SYNOPSIS

fstrcmp [ -p ] first-string second-string

fstrcmp -w first-string second-string

fstrcmp -a first-file second-file

fstrcmp -s needle haystack...

fstrcmp --version

DESCRIPTION

The fstrcmp command is used to make fuzzy comparisons between strings. The "edit distance" between the strings is printed, with 0.0 meaning the strings are utterly un-alike, and 1.0 meaning the strings are identical.

You may need to quote the string to insulate them from the shell.

OPTIONS

The fstrcmp command understands the following options:

-a

--files-as-bytes

This option is used to compare two files as arrays of bytes. See fmemcmp(3) for more information.

-p

--pair

This option is used to compare two strings as arrays of bytes. This is the default. See fstrcmp(3) for more information.

-s

--select

This option is used to select the closest needle from the provided haystack alternatives. The most similar (single) choice is printed. If none are particularly similar, nothing is printed. See fstrcmp(3) for more information. See below for example.

-V

--version

This option may be used to print the version of the fstrcmp command, and then exit.

-w

--wide-pair

This option is used to compare two multi-byte character strings. See fstrcoll(3) for more information.

EXAMPLE

The fstrcmp --select option may be used in a shell script to improve error messages.

case "$action" in
start)
    start
    ;;
stop)
    stop
    ;;
restart)
    stop
    start
    ;;
*)
    echo "$0: action \"$action\" unknown" 1>&2
    guess=`fstrcmp --select "$action" stop start restart`
    if [ "$guess" ]
    then
        echo "$0: did you mean \"$guess\" instead?" 1>&2
    fi
    exit 1
    ;;
esac

Thus, the error message frequently suggests the correct action in the face of simple finger problems on the command line.

COPYRIGHT

fstrcmp version 0.7
Copyright (C) 2009 Peter Miller
Peter Miller <[email protected]>

The comparison code is derived from the fuzzy comparison functions in GNU Gettext 0.17. The GNU Gettext comparison functions were, in turn, derived from GNU Diff 2.7.

Copyright (C) 1988-2009 Free Software Foundation