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
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APROPOS(1) BSD General Commands Manual APROPOS(1) NAME
apropos, whatis -- keyword search whatis documentation databases SYNOPSIS
apropos [-d] keyword ... whatis [-d] keyword ... DESCRIPTION
The apropos utility searches a set of databases looking for documentation matching each keyword and displays the results. The whatis utility does the same search but only on complete words. -d Print extra debugging information. The keyword is simply passed to grep(1) allowing for extended regular expression matches. ENVIRONMENT
The following environment variables affect the execution of apropos: MANLOCALES, MANPATH, PATH Used to find the location of the whatis database files. See manpath(1) for additional information. PAGER Program used to display files. If unset, more -s is used. DIAGNOSTICS
The apropos utility exits 0 if a keyword matched and 1 if no keywords are matched or no whatis databases are found. SEE ALSO
grep(1), makewhatis(1), man(1), manpath(1), man.conf(5) BSD
September 1, 2010 BSD