agrep

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

agrep (approximate grep) is a fuzzy string searching program, developed by Udi Manber and Sun Wu between 1988 and 1991, for use with the Unix operating system. It was later ported to OS/2, DOS, and Windows.

It selects the best-suited algorithm for the current query from a variety of the known fastest (built-in) string searching algorithms, including Manber and Wu's bitap algorithm based on Levenshtein distances.

agrep is also the search engine in the indexer program GLIMPSE. It is free for private and non-commercial use only, and belongs to the University of Arizona.

A more recent agrep is the command-line tool provided with the TRE regular expression library. TRE agrep is more powerful than Wu-Manber agrep since it allows weights and total costs to be assigned separately to individual groups in the pattern. It can also handle Unicode. Unlike Wu-Manber agrep, TRE agrep is licensed under the GNU LGPL.