whatis(1) General Commands Manual whatis(1)NAME
whatis - search the whatis database for complete words.
SYNOPSIS
whatis keyword ...
DESCRIPTION
whatis searches a set of database files containing short descriptions of system commands for keywords and displays the result on the stan-
dard output. Only complete word matches are displayed.
The whatis database is created using the command /usr/libexec/makewhatis.
AUTHOR
John W. Eaton was the original author of man. Zeyd M. Ben-Halim released man 1.2, and Andries Brouwer followed up with versions 1.3 thru
1.5p. Federico Lucifredi <flucifredi@acm.org> is the current maintainer.
SEE ALSO apropos(1), man(1).
September 19, 2005 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)