APROPOS(1) BSD General Commands Manual APROPOS(1)NAMEapropos — locate commands by keyword lookup
SYNOPSISapropos [-C path] [-M path] [-m path] [-S subsection] [-s section]
keyword ...
DESCRIPTIONapropos 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 instances
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:
-C Use different man(1) configuration file than the default,
/etc/man.conf.
-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 stan‐
dard directories, or the directories supplied with the -M option or
the MANPATH environment variable.
-S subsection
Restrict the search to pages for the specified machine architec‐
ture. By default, pages for all architectures are shown.
-s section
Restrict the search to the specified section of the manual. By
default, pages from all sections are shown.
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
/etc/man.conf man(1) configuration file, used to get location of whatis
database if MANPATH is not set.
SEE ALSOman(1), whatis(1), whereis(1), man.conf(5), makewhatis(8)HISTORY
The apropos command appeared in 3.0BSD.
BSD May 7, 2009 BSD
