[Rd] A possible improvement to apropos

[Kurt Hornik]

>>>>> Seth Falcon writes:

> Kurt Hornik <Kurt.Hornik at wu-wien.ac.at> writes:
>>>>>>> Robert Gentleman writes:
>> 
>>> I would also, personally prefer some sort of approximate matching since 
>>> there are different ways to spell some words, and some folks abbreviate 
>>> parts of words.
>> 
>> The same design has been employed by help.search for a long time, for
>> exactly the same reasons (albeit with slightly different agrep
>> defaults).

> I may not have spent enough time adjusting the behavior, but when I
> tried agrep for apropos, I found that I almost always got way too many
> hits and found the case-insensitive grep the right balance.

Have you tried the help.search design?  It uses approximate matching
only if the match string is long enough (no less than 5 characters,
something slightly larger may be useful for apropos()).

-k