Search::Dict(3p)

Search::Dict3p

Look - search for key in dictionary file

Usage

    use Search::Dict;
    look *FILEHANDLE, $key, $dict, $fold;
    use Search::Dict;
    look *FILEHANDLE, $key, $params;

Overview

Sets file position in FILEHANDLE to be first line greater than or equal (stringwise) to $key. Returns the new file position, or -1 if an error occurs.

The flags specify dictionary order and case folding:

If $dict is true, search by dictionary order (ignore anything but word characters and whitespace). The default is honour all characters.

If $fold is true, ignore case. The default is to honour case.

If there are only three arguments and the third argument is a hash reference, the keys of that hash can have values "dict", "fold", and "comp" or "xfrm" (see below), and their corresponding values will be used as the parameters.

If a comparison subroutine (comp) is defined, it must return less than zero, zero, or greater than zero, if the first comparand is less than, equal, or greater than the second comparand.

If a transformation subroutine (xfrm) is defined, its value is used to transform the lines read from the filehandle before their comparison.

Releases

32 releases since OpenBSD 5.0; the text changed 20 times.

  1. 5.0–5.3
  2. 5.4–5.5
  3. 5.6
  4. 5.7
  5. 5.8–5.9
  6. 6.0
  7. 6.1
  8. 6.2
  9. 6.3–6.4
  10. 6.5
  11. 6.6
  12. 6.7
  13. 6.8
  14. 6.9–7.2
  15. 7.3
  16. 7.4
  17. 7.5
  18. 7.6
  19. 7.7–7.8
  20. 7.9
  21. 8.0

From man 8.0-current-20261101 in OpenBSD 8.0-current (2026-11-01). Parsed by carta from the page's man source.