WHEREIS(1) General Commands Manual WHEREIS(1)NAME
whereis - locate programs
SYNOPSIS
whereis program ...
DESCRIPTION
The whereis utility checks the standard binary directories for the specified programs, printing out the paths of any it finds.
The path searched is the string returned by the sysctl(8) utility for the ``user.cs_path'' string.
SEE ALSO sysctl(8),
COMPATIBILITY
The historic flags and arguments for the whereis utility are no longer available in this version.
HISTORY
The whereis command appeared in 3.0BSD.
3rd Berkeley Distribution November 27, 1996 WHEREIS(1)
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WHEREIS(1) General Commands Manual WHEREIS(1)NAME
whereis - locate the binary, source, and manual page files for a command
SYNOPSIS
whereis [-bmsu] [-BMS directory... -f] filename...
DESCRIPTION
whereis locates source/binary and manuals sections for specified files. The supplied names are first stripped of leading pathname compo-
nents and any (single) trailing extension of the form .ext, for example, .c. Prefixes of s. resulting from use of source code control are
also dealt with. whereis then attempts to locate the desired program in a list of standard Linux places.
OPTIONS -b Search only for binaries.
-m Search only for manual sections.
-s Search only for sources.
-u Search for unusual entries. A file is said to be unusual if it does not have one entry of each requested type. Thus
`whereis -m-u *' asks for those files in the current directory which have no documentation.
-B Change or otherwise limit the places where whereis searches for binaries.
-M Change or otherwise limit the places where whereis searches for manual sections.
-S Change or otherwise limit the places where whereis searches for sources.
-f Terminate the last directory list and signals the start of file names, and must be used when any of the -B, -M, or -S options are
used.
EXAMPLE
Find all files in /usr/bin which are not documented in /usr/man/man1 with source in /usr/src:
example% cd /usr/bin
example% whereis -u -M /usr/man/man1 -S /usr/src -f *
FILES
/{bin,sbin,etc}
/usr/{lib,bin,old,new,local,games,include,etc,src,man,sbin,
X386,TeX,g++-include}
/usr/local/{X386,TeX,X11,include,lib,man,etc,bin,games,emacs}
SEE ALSO chdir(2V)BUGS
Since whereis uses chdir(2V) to run faster, pathnames given with the -M, -S, or -B must be full; that is, they must begin with a `/'.
whereis has a hard-coded path, so may not always find what you're looking for.
AVAILABILITY
The whereis command is part of the util-linux-ng package and is available from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux-ng/.
8 May 1994 WHEREIS(1)