| Name | Synopsis | Description | Options | Exit status | Files | See also | COLOPHON | |
|  | 
lookbib(1)               General Commands Manual               lookbib(1)
       lookbib - search bibliographic databases interactively
       lookbib [-i string] [-t n] file ...
       lookbib --help
       lookbib -v
       lookbib --version
       lookbib writes a prompt to the standard error stream (unless the
       standard input stream is not a terminal), reads from the standard
       input a line containing a set of keywords, searches each
       bibliographic database file for references containing those
       keywords, writes any references found to the standard output
       stream, and repeats this process until the end of input.  For each
       database file to be searched, if an index file.i created by
       indxbib(1) exists, then it will be searched instead; each index
       can cover multiple databases.
       --help displays a usage message, while -v and --version show
       version information; all exit afterward.
       -i string
              When searching files for which no index exists, ignore the
              contents of fields whose names are in string.
       -t n   Require only the first n characters of keys to be given.
              The default is 6.
       lookbib exits with status 0 on successful operation, status 2 if
       the program cannot interpret its command-line arguments, and
       status 1 if it encounters an error during operation.
       file.i Index files.
       “Some Applications of Inverted Indexes on the Unix System”, by M.
       E. Lesk, 1978, AT&T Bell Laboratories Computing Science Technical
       Report No. 69.
       refer(1), lkbib(1), indxbib(1)
       This page is part of the groff (GNU troff) project.  Information
       about the project can be found at 
       ⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/⟩.  If you have a bug report for
       this manual page, see ⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/⟩.  This
       page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/groff.git⟩ on 2025-08-11.  (At
       that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in
       the repository was 2025-08-09.)  If you discover any rendering
       problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is
       a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
       corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
       (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       man-pages@man7.org
groff 1.23.0.2722-658f-dirty    2025-01-02                     lookbib(1)