look
display lines beginning with a given string
see also :
grep - sort
Synopsis
look [-bdf]
[-t termchar] string
[file ...]
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description
The look utility displays
any lines in file which contain string as a
prefix.
If file
is not specified, the file /usr/share/dict/words is
used, only alphanumeric characters are compared and the case
of alphabetic characters is ignored.
The following
options are available:
-b
Use a binary
search on the given word list. If you are ignoring case with
-f or ignoring non-alphanumeric characters with
-d, the file must be sorted in the same way.
Please note that these options are the default if no
filename is given. See sort(1) for more information on
sorting files.
-d
Dictionary
character set and order, i.e., only alphanumeric characters
are compared.
-f
Ignore the case
of alphabetic characters.
-t
Specify a
string termination character, i.e., only the characters in
string up to and including the first occurrence of
termchar are compared.
compatibility
The original manual page stated that tabs and blank characters
participated in comparisons when the -d option was
specified. This was incorrect and the current man page matches
the historic implementation.
look uses a linear search by default instead of a binary
search, which is what most other implementations use by default.
environment
The LANG, LC_ALL and LC_CTYPE environment variables affect the
execution of the look utility. Their effect is described
in environ(7).
exit status
/usr/share/dict/words
the dictionary
The look utility exits 0 if one or more lines were found
and displayed, 1 if no lines were found, and >1 if an error
occurred.
bugs
Lines are not compared according
to the current locale’s collating order. Input files
must be sorted with LC_COLLATE set to ’C’.
BSD
July 17, 2004 BSD
history
A look utility appeared
in Version 7 AT&T UNIX.
see also
grep , sort