NAME

look — display lines beginning with a given string

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

The look utility displays any lines in file which contain string as a prefix. As look performs a binary search, the lines in file must be sorted.

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:

-d, --alphanum

Dictionary character set and order, i.e., only alphanumeric characters are compared.

-f, --ignore-case

Ignore the case of alphabetic characters.

-t, --terminate termchar

Specify a string termination character, i.e., only the characters in string up to and including the first occurrence of termchar are compared.

ENVIRONMENT

The LANG, LC_ALL and LC_CTYPE environment variables affect the execution of the look utility. Their effect is described in environ(7).

FILES

/usr/share/dict/words

the dictionary

EXIT STATUS

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.

EXAMPLES

Look for lines starting with ‘xylen’ in the file /usr/share/dict/words:

$ look xylen
xylene
xylenol
xylenyl

Same as above, but do not consider any characters in string beyond the first ‘e’. Note that -f is implicit since we are searching the default file /usr/share/dict/words:

$ look -t e xylen
Xyleborus
xylem
xylene
xylenol
xylenyl
xyletic

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.

The -a and --alternative flags are ignored for compatibility.

SEE ALSO

grep(1), sort(1)

HISTORY

A look utility appeared in Version 7 AT&T UNIX.

BUGS

Lines are not compared according to the current locale's collating order. Input files must be sorted with LC_COLLATE set to ‘C’.