whatis - display one-line manual page descriptions
whatis [ -dlv?V ]
[ -r | -w ] [ -s
list ] [ -m system [ ,. . . ] ]
[ -M path ] [ -L
locale ] [ -C file ] name
. . .
Each manual page has a short description available within it.
whatis searches the manual page names and displays the
manual page descriptions of any name matched.
name may contain wildcards (-w) or be a
regular expression (-r). Using these options, it may be
necessary to quote the name or escape (\) the special
characters to stop the shell from interpreting them.
index databases are used during the search, and are updated by the mandb program. Depending on your installation, this may be run by a periodic cron job, or may need to be run manually after new manual pages have been installed. To produce an old style text whatis database from the relative index database, issue the command:
whatis -M manpath -w '*' | sort
> manpath/whatis
where manpath is a manual page hierarchy such as
/usr/man.
Print debugging information.
Print verbose warning messages.
Interpret each name as a regular expression. If a
name matches any part of a page name, a match will be made.
This option causes whatis to be somewhat slower due to
the nature of database searches.
Interpret each name as a pattern containing shell style
wildcards. For a match to be made, an expanded name must match
the entire page name. This option causes whatis to be
somewhat slower due to the nature of database searches.
Do not trim output to the terminal width. Normally, output will be truncated to the terminal width to avoid ugly results from poorly-written NAME sections.
list,
--sections=list,
--section=listSearch only the given manual sections. list is a colon- or
comma-separated list of sections. If an entry in list is a
simple section, for example "3", then the displayed list of descriptions
will include pages in sections "3", "3perl", "3x", and so on; while if
an entry in list has an extension, for example "3perl", then
the list will only include pages in that exact part of the manual
section.
system [ ,. . . ] ,
--systems=system [ ,. . . ]If this system has access to other operating systems' manual page names, they can be accessed using this option. To search NewOS's manual page names, use the option -m NewOS.
The system specified can be a combination of comma delimited
operating system names. To include a search of the native operating
system's manual page names, include the system name man
in the argument string. This option will override the
$SYSTEM environment variable.
path,
--manpath=pathSpecify an alternate set of colon-delimited manual page hierarchies to search. By default, whatis uses the $MANPATH environment variable, unless it is empty or unset, in which case it will determine an appropriate manpath based on your $PATH environment variable. This option overrides the contents of $MANPATH.
locale,
--locale=localewhatis will normally determine your current locale
by a call to the C function setlocale(3) which
interrogates various environment variables, possibly including
$LC_MESSAGES and $LANG. To temporarily
override the determined value, use this option to supply a
locale string directly to whatis. Note that it
will not take effect until the search for pages actually begins. Output
such as the help message will always be displayed in the initially
determined locale.
file,
--config-file=fileUse this user configuration file rather than the default of
~/.manpath.
Print a help message and exit.
Print a short usage message and exit.
Display version information.
Successful program execution.
Usage, syntax or configuration file error.
Operational error.
Nothing was found that matched the criteria specified.
If $SYSTEM is set, it will have the same effect as if it had been specified as the argument to the -m option.
If $MANPATH is set, its value is interpreted as the colon-delimited manual page hierarchy search path to use.
See the SEARCH PATH section of manpath(5) for the default behaviour and details of how this environment variable is handled.
If $MANWIDTH is set, its value is used as the terminal width (see the --long option). If it is not set, the terminal width will be calculated using the value of $COLUMNS, and ioctl(2) if available, or falling back to 80 characters if all else fails.
/usr/share/man/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)A traditional global index database cache.
/var/cache/man/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)An FHS compliant global index database cache.
/usr/share/man/ . . . /whatisA traditional whatis text database.
Wilf. (G.Wilford@ee.surrey.ac.uk).
Fabrizio Polacco (fpolacco@debian.org).
Colin Watson (cjwatson@debian.org).