lookbib(1)

💅 lookbib(1) — General Commands Manual, but make it cute 💅

okay so this is the General Commands Manual page for lookbib(1), and it is literally the interactive bibliography search bestie. no cap, it’s giving “ask a question, get references” energy 🦋

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✨ NAME ✨

lookbib — search bibliographic databases interactively 💖

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

lookbib [-i string] [-t n] file ...

lookbib --help

lookbib -v

lookbib --version

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

okay so here’s the vibe, bestie: lookbib writes a prompt to the standard error stream (unless the standard input stream is not a terminal), reads from the standard input a line containing a set of keywords, searches each bibliographic database file for references containing those keywords, writes any references found to the standard output stream, and repeats this whole process until the end of input. it’s a loop, and it ate 🔁

for each database file to be searched, if an index file.i created by indxbib(1) exists, then it will be searched instead; each index can cover multiple databases. iconic, honestly 👑

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

• --help — displays a usage message, then exits 😌
• -v, --version — show version information, then exit ✨
• -i string — when searching files for which no index exists, ignore the contents of fields whose names are in string 🙈
• -t n — require only the first n characters of keys to be given. the default is 6 🔢

all of these exit afterward, periodt 💀

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💀 EXIT STATUS 💀

• status 0 — successful operation, slay ✅
• status 2 — the program cannot interpret its command-line arguments 😭
• status 1 — it encounters an error during operation 💀

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🗂️ FILES 🗂️

• file.i — Index files.

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

“Some Applications of Inverted Indexes on the Unix System”, by M. E. Lesk, 1978, AT&T Bell Laboratories Computing Science Technical Report No. 69. 📚

• refer(1)
• lkbib(1)
• indxbib(1)

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that’s the whole page, bestie 🫶 — signing off from the General Commands Manual with source/version and date: groff 1.24.2, 2026-10-01, lookbib(1) 🌈