[clug] Circumflex

[Eyal Lebedinsky]

Hi Bryan,

On 08/17/17 18:25, Bryan Kilgallin (iiNet) via linux wrote:
> I was reading about manual section numbers. Then I came across '^'. Where is it explained?
> 
> {
> You can tell what sections a term falls in with man -k (equivalent to the apropos command). It will do substring matches too (e.g. it will show sprintf if you run man -k printf), so you need to use ^term to limit it:
> }
> 
> https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/3586/what-do-the-numbers-in-a-man-page-mean#3587

In a regular expression the '^' (at the start) indicates that the matching expression must be at the
beginning of the examined string:

$ man -k awk
awk (1)              - pattern scanning and processing language
awk (1p)             - pattern scanning and processing language
English (3pm)        - use nice English (or awk) names for ugly punctuation variables
filefuncs (3am)      - provide some file related functionality to gawk
gawk (1)             - pattern scanning and processing language
igawk (1)            - gawk with include files
readdir (3am)        - directory input parser for gawk
rwarray (3am)        - write and read gawk arrays to/from files
states (1)           - awk alike text processing tool
time (3am)           - time functions for gawk

$ man -k ^awk
awk (1)              - pattern scanning and processing language
awk (1p)             - pattern scanning and processing language
states (1)           - awk alike text processing tool
-- 
Eyal Lebedinsky (eyal at eyal.emu.id.au)