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New Linux User

More manpage madness

by George Bunyan on September 13th, 2006

Manpages are fine, so long as you know the name of the page.

That is why I am telling you about apropos and whatis, which are used to search for manpages.

Both are used command query

whatis allows you to search for a manpage by name, for example,

[~] whatis man
man (1) - an interface to the on-line reference manuals
man (7) - macros to format man pages

apropos, on the other hand, searches descriptions, for example,

[~] apropos what
sudoers (5) - list of which users may execute what
w (1) - Show who is logged on and what they are doing.
w.procps (1) - Show who is logged on and what they are doing.
whatis (1) - display manual page descriptions

If you wish to use a wildcard you must use command -w query, using * as a wildcard, for example,

[~] whatis -w wh*
whatis (1) - display manual page descriptions
whereis (1) - locate the binary, source, and manual page files for a command
which (1) - locate a command
whiptail (1) - display dialog boxes from shell scripts
who (1) - show who is logged on
whoami (1) - print effective userid
whois (1) - client for the whois directory service

George Bunyan

POSTED IN: General

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