WHEREIS(1) BSD 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 find(1), locate(1), man(1), which(1), 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.
BSD April 27, 1995 BSD
Check Out this Related Man Page
WHEREIS(1) User Commands WHEREIS(1)NAME
whereis - locate the binary, source, and manual page files for a command
SYNOPSIS
whereis [options] [-BMS directory... -f] name...
DESCRIPTION
whereis locates the binary, source and manual files for the specified command names. The supplied names are first stripped of leading
pathname components 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 the standard Linux places, and in the places
specified by $PATH and $MANPATH.
OPTIONS -b Search only for binaries.
-m Search only for manuals.
-s Search only for sources.
-u Only show the command names that have unusual entries. A command is said to be unusual if it does not have just one entry of each
explicitly requested type. Thus 'whereis -m -u *' asks for those files in the current directory which have no documentation file,
or more than one.
-B list
Limit the places where whereis searches for binaries, by a whitespace-separated list of directories.
-M list
Limit the places where whereis searches for manuals, by a whitespace-separated list of directories.
-S list
Limit the places where whereis searches for sources, by a whitespace-separated list of directories.
-f Terminates the directory list and signals the start of filenames. It must be used when any of the -B, -M, or -S options is used.
-l Output list of effective lookup paths the whereis is using. When non of -B, -M, or -S is specified the option will out hard coded
paths that the command was able to find on system.
EXAMPLE
To find all files in /usr/bin which are not documented in /usr/man/man1 or have no source in /usr/src:
$ cd /usr/bin
$ whereis -u -ms -M /usr/man/man1 -S /usr/src -f *
FILE SEARCH PATHS
By default whereis tries to find files from hard-coded paths, which are defined with glob patterns. The command attempst to use contents of
$PATH and $MANPATH environment variables as default search path. The easiest way to know what paths are in use is to add -l listing
option. Effects of the -B, -M, and -S are display with -l.
AVAILABILITY
The whereis command is part of the util-linux package and is available from Linux Kernel Archive <ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils
/util-linux/>.
util-linux March 2013 WHEREIS(1)