WHICHMAN(1)

📦 version 2.4, in debian bookworm, debian trixie, ubuntu jammy, ubuntu noble, ubuntu questing, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

💖 WHICHMAN(1) 💖

okay so bestie, welcome to the whichman manual page, from the General Commands Manual section, and it's giving "which but make it generous" 💅

✨ NAME ✨

whichman — shows you where a man page lives, using a fault tolerant approximate matching algorithm 🌸

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

whichman [-#ehIp][-t#] man-page-name

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So whichman is like a which-alike search command, but for man pages 👑 It goes digging through the MANPATH environment variable.

If that variable isn't set at all? No stress, it just uses this default and moves on:

/usr/share/man:/usr/man:/usr/X11R6/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/local/man

Now here's the tea: unlike which, this program does not stop at the first match 🫶 It literally does not. And honestly the name should probably have been something like whereman, because it's not a "which" at all, bestie, it's a whole different vibe 😭 whichman shows you all the man pages that match, and it lets you figure out which sections those pages belong to.

Also — and this is lowkey iconic — whichman can handle international manpage path names for different languages. Man pages in different languages may be stored in:

.../man/<country_code>/man[1-9]/...

By default, whichman does fault tolerant approximate string matching ✨ With a default tolerance level of:

(strlen(searchpattern) - number of wildcards)/6 + 1

no cap, that's the actual formula 🌈

💅 OPTIONS 💅

  • -h — prints a little help/usage information. your girl just wants to be helpful 🥺
  • -I — do a case sensitive search (the default is case in-sensitive, so this is the spicy one 🔥)
  • -e — use exact matching when searching for a given man page, and the wildcards * and ? get disabled 💀
  • -p — prints the actual tolerance level right in front of the man page name 📏
  • -# or -t# — sets the fault tolerance level to #. The fault tolerance level is an integer # in the range 0-255. It says the maximum number of errors allowed while finding the approximate match. A tolerance_level of zero allows exact matches only — but it does NOT disable the wildcards * and ? ⚠️ (important distinction, bestie, don't get it twisted)

The search key may contain the wildcards * and ? (but like, peep the -e option first 👀):

  • '*' — any arbitrary number of character
  • '?' — one character

The last argument to whichman is not parsed for options, because the program needs at least one man-page-name argument. Which means:

whichman -x

will not complain about a wrong option — it will just search for the man page named -x 😌 periodt.

🌟 EXAMPLE 🌟

whichman print

This will e.g. find the man-pages:

/usr/share/man/man1/printf.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/printf.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/rint.3.gz

look at that, three results, she ate 🍓

💀 BUGS 💀

The wildcards '?' and '*' can not be escaped. These characters function always as wildcards. This is however not a big problem, since there is hardly any man page that has these characters in its name 🙈 so like... it's fine, honestly.

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Guido Socher (guido@linuxfocus.org)

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

ftff(1), man(1)

and that's the whole page, bestie!! this one came out of the Search utilities corner of the world, dated April 1998 — yeah, she's vintage, she's a classic, and she still slays 💖✨🎀

📦 where this page comes from