NAME
apropos —
locate commands by keyword
lookup
SYNOPSIS
apropos |
[-M path]
[-m path]
keyword ... |
DESCRIPTION
Apropos shows which manual pages contain instances of
any of the given keyword(s) in their title line. Each
word is considered separately and case of letters is ignored. Words which are
part of other words are considered; when looking for “compile”,
apropos will also list all instances of
“compiler”.
If the line output by apropos starts
“name(section) ...” you can enter
“man section name” to get its
documentation.
The options are as follows:
-M- Override the list of standard directories
apropossearches for a database named whatis.db. The supplied path must be a colon “:” separated list of directories. This search path may also be set using the environment variableMANPATH. -m- Augment the list of standard directories
apropossearches for its database. The supplied path must be a colon “:” separated list of directories. These directories will be searched before the standard directories, or the directories supplied with the-Moption or theMANPATHenvironment variable.
ENVIRONMENT
MANPATH- The standard search path used by
man(1) may be overridden by specifying a path in the
MANPATHenvironment variable. The format of the path is a colon “:” separated list of directories.
FILES
- whatis.db
- name of the apropos database
SEE ALSO
HISTORY
The apropos command appeared in
3.0BSD.