whatis(1) [netbsd man page]
WHATIS(1) BSD General Commands Manual WHATIS(1) NAME
whatis -- describe what a command is SYNOPSIS
whatis command ... DESCRIPTION
The whatis program queries the database /var/db/man.db for manual pages with name command and prints the name of the manual page, the section and the description from the section NAME. SEE ALSO
apropos(1), makemandb(8) HISTORY
The whatis command appeared in 3.0BSD. It was rewritten in NetBSD 6.0 to use the SQLite index created by makemandb(8). BSD
February 1, 2012 BSD
Check Out this Related Man Page
whatis(1) User Commands whatis(1) NAME
whatis - display a one-line summary about a keyword SYNOPSIS
whatis command... DESCRIPTION
whatis looks up a given command and displays the header line from the manual section. You can then run the man(1) command to get more information. If the line starts `name(section) ...' you can do `man -s section name' to get the documentation for it. Try `whatis ed' and then you should do `man -s 1 ed' to get the manual page for ed(1). whatis is actually just the -f option to the man(1) command. whatis uses the /usr/share/man/windex database. This database is created by catman(1M). If this database does not exist, whatis will fail. FILES
/usr/share/man/windex Table of contents and keyword database ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes: +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ | ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ |Availability |SUNWdoc | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ |CSI |enabled | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ SEE ALSO
apropos(1), man(1), catman(1M), attributes(5) SunOS 5.10 14 Sep 1992 whatis(1)