Explanation: Whatis and Apropos
Hands down, two of the weirdest commands I’ve run across in Linux are the whatis and the apropos commands. I said they were weird, not un-useful. They’re very, very useful commands.
Both whatis and apropros are commands that will attempt to tell you what a file is. This can be good information to have when you’re looking at all the weird application names in your /bin or /sbin directory.
Both commands search the whatis database, but the whatis command will only return exact matches for the specified keywords and apropos will return partial matches.
For example, the command:
whatis zic
returns
zic (8) - time zone compiler
Whereas whatis zi returns:
zi: nothing appropriate
And apropos zi returns an entire list of applications containing zi either in the file name or description.
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