.\" lookbibtex.1
.TH LOOKBIBTEX 1 " 5 September 1991"

.SH NAME
lookbibtex \- find references in a bibtex database

.SH SYNOPSIS
.B lookbibtex
[ \-s
]
[ \-f
.I field
]
.I regexp
[
.I bibfiles...
]

.SH DESCRIPTION
lookbibtex searches through bibtex databases,
printing entries that match
.I regexp.
See 
.BR bibtex (1)
for a description of bibtex databases.
.I Regexp
is a Perl regular expression.
See
.BR perl (1)
for an explanation of differences between perl and standard regular
expressions.

The \-s option passes @string defintions through.
By default, they're eaten.

Searches can be limited to particular bibtex fields
with the \-f option.

If no
.I bibfiles
are specified,
all bibtex files in the path 
.SM BIBINPUTS
are used.
A \- for 
.I bibfiles
reads a bibtex database from standard input.

To do "and" searches on two fields use shell pipes, reading
the output of one search as the bibliography of the second
(using 
.RB ` \- '
for
.I bibfiles
in a pipeline).
For example, to find what someone named Kafka wrote
about emacs keyboard layout, do:
.IP
.B
lookbibtex \-f author kafka | lookbibtex \-f title meta \-
.LP

To do "or" searches, use regular expressions.
For example, you could be concerned with 
only careful authors, like Kunth and Kafka:
.IP
.B
lookbibtex \-f author 'kunth\||\|kafka'
.LP

More sophisticated searches can be achieved by combining
these techniques.


.SH AUTHOR
John Heidemann <johnh@cs.ucla.edu>


.SH "ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES"

.TP
.SM BIBINPUTS
The path
.SM BIBINPUTS
is searched for
.B .bib
files if none are given on the command line.  See
.BR TeX (1)
for a description of the path format.


.SH SEE ALSO
.BR bibtex (1),
.BR bibdestringify (1),
.BR perl (1).


.SH BUGS
.B Lookbibtex
is written in Perl, so it will not run on machines
which do not have perl installed (although this arguably
a bug of the person too lazy to install such a useful tool).

Multiple bibtex fields on one line will be missed.

There should be a way of switching off the file name prefixing when
searching multiple files.  For now, simply
.I cat
the files into
.IR lookbib .

This program does not implement a full bibtex parser,
just a good approximation.  Because of this, it may
fail on unusual bibtex files.  In particular,
the @ that begins a bibtex entry, and the } which end it
must be the first non-whitespace character on their line, or they
will be missed.
Also, multi-line fields surrounded with double quotes or
curley brackets
are handled correctly,
but ugly combinations of quotes and brackets and backslashed
versions of the same may fail.
Umlaut accents are removed from the search
string.

I make no predictions as to how this program will react 
to bibtex files with syntax errors.