apropos(1) General Commands Manual apropos(1)
Name
apropos - locate commands by keyword lookup
Syntax
apropos keyword...
Description
The command shows which manual sections contain instances of any of the given keywords in their title. Each word is considered separately
and the case of letters is ignored. Words that are part of other words are listed. Thus, looking for the word compile hits all instances
of `compiler' also.
If the line starts `name(section) ...' you can do `man section name' to get the documentation for it. The following command line lists all
commands that have to do with formatting:
apropos format
To then access the reference page for the printf subroutine that you see listed, type:
man 3s printf
The command is actually just the -k option to the command.
Files
/usr/lib/whatis data base
See Also
man(1), whatis(1), catman(8)
apropos(1)
