begin quoting Todd Walton as of Wed, Nov 29, 2006 at 06:57:25PM -0600: > On 11/28/06, Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >The 'apropos' command is quite useful if you think you know what you > >might be looking for in terms of manpages. > > You'd think it would be. I like having it around, but I can't really > think of anytime that I've used it and it's helped me. I always type > 'apropos something' and I get back a buttload of results in which my > search term is only something embedded within a larger word (e.g. > "six" in "posix") or programmer-friendly / user-unfriendly stuff, or > perl pods. I can't think of anytime that I've found something using > apropos.
I have, although I can't remember which of the many times I've used it what I was looking for. The "embedded in larger word" is annoying -- I use grep -v to trim down the list (e.g., "apropos foo | grep -v TCL_"). I also tend to use apropos to give me some pages where I then go and look at the SEE ALSO section. Apropos may not give me what I want, but it often gives me enough to track down what I needed. > As for the ntpd being man 8 or man 1, why would there be this > difference? Most of you are using a Red Hat derivative, so this could > be just a distro difference. Or maybe the whole world does it one > way, and only Gentoo is different. Or... ? I don't know why it would be a difference for ntp; for other things, sometimes the manpage for something in one section obscures the manpage in another section, and getting a list of all the manpages, including sections, can be useful. -- _ |\_ \| -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
