On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 4:05 PM, thilo jeremias <[email protected]> wrote: > The man page is clear: > > -k Search man pages for keyword(s), in the same manner as > apropos(1).
If you want old apropos, there is -l option or set environment variable APROPOS and use man -k. :) > And doing > -bash-4.3$ man -k re | wc > 1515 22761 148437 > -bash-4.3$ > > is meaning less. It's not meaning less. The first result is re(4), which is probably what you are looking for. Just 're' as a query is hard to guess for apropos, it might mean the hardware driver, or regular expression, or re-initialize, re-sample, re-map etc., and that's why you see so many results. I encourage you to compare `apropos -l re` and `apropos re` and decide which output is more useful :) Here is what I see: $ apropos -n 10 -M re re (4) RealTek 8139C+/8169/8169S/8168/8110S/8111 PCI Ethernet adapter driver FcInitReinitialize (3) re-initialize library mremap (2) re-map a virtual memory address refuse (3) Re-implementation of a file system in userspace system magick (1) convert between image formats as well as resize an image, blur, crop, despeckle, dither, draw on, flip, join, re-sample, and much more. convert (1) convert between image formats as well as resize an image, blur, crop, despeckle, dither, draw on, flip, join, re-sample, and much more. magick-script (1) scripting language that converts between image formats as well as resize an image, blur, crop, despeckle, dither, draw on, flip, join, re-sample, and much more. mogrify (1) resize an image, blur, crop, despeckle, dither, draw on, flip, join, re-sample, and much more. Mogrify overwrites the original image file, whereas, convert(1) writes to a different image file. chpass (1) add or change user database information awi (4) AMD PCnetMobile IEEE 802.11 PCMCIA wireless network driver $ apropos -n 20 -M -l re #old apropos output winfo(n) - Return window-related information ttk::treeview(n) - hierarchical multicolumn data display widget ttk::sizegrip(n) - Bottom-right corner resize widget ttk::scale(n) - Create and manipulate a scale widget ttk::progressbar(n) - Provide progress feedback ttk::menubutton(n) - Widget that pops down a menu when pressed ttk::button(n) - Widget that issues a command when pressed toplevel(n) - Create and manipulate 'toplevel' main and popup window widgets tk_optionMenu(n) - Create an option menubutton and its menu tk_messageBox(n) - pops up a message window and waits for user response. tk_focusNext(n) - Utility procedures for managing the input focus. tk_dialog(n) - Create modal dialog and wait for response tk_chooseDirectory(n) - pops up a dialog box for the user to select a directory. text(n) - Create and manipulate 'text' hypertext editing widgets spinbox(n) - Create and manipulate 'spinbox' value spinner widgets send(n) - Execute a command in a different application scrollbar(n) - Create and manipulate 'scrollbar' scrolling control and indicator widgets scale(n) - Create and manipulate 'scale' value-controlled slider widgets safe::loadTk(n) - Load Tk into a safe interpreter. radiobutton(n) - Create and manipulate 'radiobutton' pick-one widgets With the new apropos(1), most of the times you would find the result you were searching for in the top, there will be some unrelated results also in the mix, but you can just ignore them. :) > > I just wonder how can I search for the cryptic keywords I used to be able to > find. Could you give few examples of such keywords where you don't see the expected result in the top, and it might help me to improve apropos :) > > I agree stemming and full text search is a nice feature, but just a feature. > > Giving the user the option would be democratic. > :-) > > I just got used to use man -k in the last 25 years, and it would be a > unexpected change. It is understandable, you can use `apropos -l` if you preferred the classic version :) - Abhinav
