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

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

COPYRIGHT

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.