On Fri, 26 Feb 2016 16:43:05 +0000 (UTC) James <[email protected]> wrote:
[ about aprospos ] > Looks like an alias to 'whatis'? 'whereis' still one of my favorite > little tools. It queries the whatis database differently depending on how it's called. Think of the whatis database as columnar and containing two columns. The left column contains the program name (the command used to invoke the program) and the right side contains the first line of the manual's program synopsis. apropos searches both columns using the keyword as a regular expression to find all occurrences of the keyword. These occurrences may be embedded in the command word or the words of the synopsis. For example, apropos cat returns lines containing the word catalog, category, duplicate, application, etc. whatis, on the other hand, searches only the left hand column, which contains only the program name. This feature is helpful if you know the name of a command, but not its function. That's from <http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/1329>, written 20 years ago, but AFAIK these things haven't changed.
