whatis(1) - Manual pages

NAME

whatis — describe what a command is

whatis [-M path] [-m path] command ...

Whatis looks up a given command and gives the header line from the manual page. You can then use the man(1) command to get more information.

The options are as follows:

-M path: Override the list of standard directories whatis searches for its 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 variable MANPATH.
-m path: Augment the list of standard directories whatis searches for its database named “whatis.db”. 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 -M option or the MANPATH environment variable are searched.

MANPATH: The standard search path used by man(1) may be overridden by specifying a path in the MANPATH environment variable.

The whatis command appeared in 3.0BSD.