WHATIS(1) General Commands Manual WHATIS(1)NAME
whatis, apropos - give single line descriptions for manual pages
SYNOPSIS
whatis [-a] title
apropos keyword
DESCRIPTION
Whatis lists the one line description from the whatis(5) database describing the title given. It displays all the lines with the title
from the first whatis file that has those titles. It uses the same search path as man(1).
Apropos searches through all whatis files for the given keywords. It lists any line that has the keyword anywhere on the line.
OPTIONS -a Search all whatis files.
SEE ALSO man(1), grep(1), whatis(5).
AUTHOR
Kees J. Bot (kjb@cs.vu.nl)
WHATIS(1)
Check Out this Related Man Page
WHATIS(5) File Formats Manual WHATIS(5)NAME
whatis - database of online manual pages
SYNOPSIS
/usr/man/*/whatis
/usr/man/whatis
DESCRIPTION
The whatis file in each manual page directory is a database of titles for manual pages. This database is used by man(1) to map titles to
manual pages names. The database is created by makewhatis(1) from the NAME sections of the manual pages.
The NAME secions must be simple lines with no troff fluff but one backslash like these two:
whatis - database of online manual pages
cawf, nroff - C version of the nroff-like, Amazingly Workable (text) Formatter
These lines are transformed by makewhatis to these two lines for the database:
cawf, nroff (1) - C version of the nroff-like, Amazingly Workable (text) Formatter
whatis (5) - database of online manual pages
As you can see they are in section number order, so that man searches them in section order.
Each entry is just a single line, restricting the NAME section to a single line too with just one dash, and commas and spaces before the
dash as you see above.
SEE ALSO man(1), whatis(1), makewhatis(1), man(7).
BUGS
It seems to be impossible for many manual page writers to keep the NAME section simple. They also like to use every font available in
their documents. My simple scripts can't read their NAME sections, my simple me can't read their texts.
AUTHOR
Kees J. Bot (kjb@cs.vu.nl)
WHATIS(5)