Hello there,
I'm not an active user of FreeDOS, so I'm only
a listener on this channel, just for curiosity.
Regarding 'apropos' and 'whatis' and their relatives:
these commands are related to manual pages, it's all
Unix philosophy. If you have a Linux around, try
man whatis
and
whatis whatis
and you'll know everything. In my view, 'man'
is much easier to use than 'info' (Linux).
'whatis' and 'apropos' search a database created
from a collection of man pages by 'makewhatis'.
Look at
man makewhatis
for an explanation.
'Whatis' looks for complete word matches,
'apropos' for any matches in the database,
that's the only difference (in my understanding).
Thus 'Apropos' may produce a great amount of
output.
I find these commands very useful for looking
around on an unknown system (or a known system
after a substantial update ;-), combined with
'grep' to filter out references that are really
relevant for my search.
All this is essentially for people who already
know what's there or what should be there, not
really for novices. If you like browser-style
help, you will probably dislike man pages and
their relatives. Just a matter of taste. I wouldn't
consider them elementary in the sense of something
that should be part of a BASE distribution, in
that I agree with Ralf.
DJGPP had man pages and also 'whatis' and such,
if I'm not mistaken. It's many many years ago
I was running DJGPP on MS-DOS 6.22. Marvellous
times, everything was so simple and easy.
Keep the FreeDOS project up and thriving!
Best wishes to all,
Jiri
_________________________
Jiri Wackermann, Dr.phil.
Independent researcher
Elzstr. 33b
D-79261 Gutach i.Br.
Deutschland/Germany
Tel.: +49 7681 4936707
Tel.: +49 151 29105469 (mobile)
E-Mail: m...@jiri-wackermann.eu
"Est modus in rebus ..." (Horatius)
_______________________________________
On 2017-06-13 06:39, Ralf Quint wrote:
On 6/12/2017 3:14 PM, Simon van Meygaarden wrote:
Greetings, Folks.
One of the things I really like about FreeDOS 1.2 is the incredible
Help browser: a perfect way to browse through the documentation, and,
in my opinion, much better then the man-pages in Linux.
In "How to use the FreeDOS help" I found a reference to an Apropos
command, and a Whatis command, which seemed very helpful in trying to
find out what FreeDOS has to offer. However, these commands are not
available in either BASE or FULL installation, FDIMPLES doesn't
mention them, and I can't find them in the Packages.
So the question is: am I doing something wrong, and, if not, how do I
add these commands to my system?
First time I hear about those programs, and they are not something
elementary to (Free)DOS, they are rather Linux commands/programs.
You don't really miss out on anything on your setup. The author of the
Help system might be able (or not) to shed some more light on this...
Ralf
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