Jeffrey Friedl Omron Corp. Nagaokakyo, Japan April 22, 1994 LOOKUP provides a way to quickly and powerfully search text files. The author's prime use is to search "edict" (a Japanese-English word list), "kanjidic" (a database about Japanese characters), and "/usr/dict/words" (list of English words). However, one could easily be used to search for variables in huge programs, or most any other application of searching line-based text. From the manual page: Romaji-to-Kana Converter Lookup can convert romaji to kana for you, even "on the fly" as you type. Fuzzy Searching Searches can be a bit "vague" or "fuzzy" , so that you'll be able to find the Japanese word for Tokyo even if you try to search for "to kyo" (the proper Japanese "spelling" being "to u kyo u") Regular Expressions Uses the powerful and expressive regular expression for searching. One can easily specify complex searches that affect "I want lines that look like such-and-such, but not like this-and-that, but that also have this particular characteristic...." Filters You can have lookup not list certain lines that would otherwise match your search, yet can optionally save them for quick review. For example, you could have all nameonly entries from edict filtered from normal output. Automatic Modifications Similarly, you can do a standard search-and-replace on lines just before they print, perhaps to remove information you don't care to see on most searches. For example, if you're generally not interested in kanjidic's info on Chinese readings, you can have them removed from lines before printing. Smart Word-Preference Mode You can have lookup list only entries with whole words that match your search (as opposed to an embedded match, such as finding "the" inside "them" ), but if no wholeword matches exist, will go ahead and list any entry that matches the search. Handy Features Other handy features include a dynamically settable and parameterized prompt, automatic highlighting of that part of the line that matches your search, an output pager, readline-like input with horizontal scrolling for long input lines, a ".lookup" startup file, automated programability, and much more. The program just spits out encoded Japanese. If your terminal doesn't support JIS, Shift-JIS, or EUC, you may as well stop now. See the "BUILDING" file for sections COMPILING MAN PAGE RUNNING ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jeffrey jfriedl@nff.ncl.omron.co.jp