NAME¶

fstrcmp - fuzzy comparison of strings

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.

EXIT STATUS¶

The fstrcmp command exits with status 1 on any error. The fstrcmp command only exits with status 0 if there are no errors.

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

SEE ALSO¶

fstrcmp(3)

fuzzy comparison of strings

fstrcoll(3)

fuzzy comparison of two multi‐byte character strings

fstrcmpi(3)

fuzzy comparison of strings, integer variation

COPYRIGHT¶

fstrcmp version 0.7
Copyright (C) 2009 Peter Miller
Peter Miller <pmiller@opensource.org.au>

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