APROPOS(1) BSD Reference Manual APROPOS(1)NAMEapropos - locate commands by keyword lookup
SYNOPSISapropos [-M path] [-m path] keyword ...
DESCRIPTION
Apropos shows which manual pages contain instances of any of the given
keyword(s) in their title line. Each word is considered separately and
case of letters is ignored. Words which are part of other words are con-
sidered; when looking for ``compile'', apropos will also list all in-
stances of ``compiler''.
If the line output by apropos starts ``name(section) ...'' you can enter
``man section name'' to get its documentation.
The options are as follows:
-M Override the list of standard directories apropos searches for a
database named whatis.db. The supplied path must be a colon ``:''
separated list of directories. This search path may also be set
using the environment variable MANPATH.
-m Augment the list of standard directories apropos searches for its
database. The supplied path must be a colon ``:'' separated list
of directories. These directories will be searched before the
standard directories, or the directories supplied with the -M op-
tion or the MANPATH environment variable.
ENVIRONMENT
MANPATH The standard search path used by man(1) may be overridden by
specifying a path in the MANPATH environment variable. The for-
mat of the path is a colon ``:'' separated list of directories.
FILES
whatis.db name of the apropos database
SEE ALSOmakewhatis(1), man(1), whatis(1), whereis(1)HISTORY
The apropos command appeared in 3.0BSD.
BSDI BSD/OS June 29, 1993 1
