If "nc.openbsd" only appears in the description rather than in the page name, then apropos will show it but whatis won't; that's the essence of the distinction between those two programs. It rather depends what you want, but mostly, apropos is more useful for queries where you can remember a keyword but not exactly what the page is called. It typically produces far too much noise when given a command name, particularly for some of the short ones.
There's actually a bug where apropos never prints "nothing appropriate" even when it couldn't find any matches for an argument, which I noticed and fixed while fixing this bug. There should be no need to restrict apropos' input. I've fixed this properly for man-db 2.6.2: Wed Feb 22 03:04:45 GMT 2012 Colin Watson <[email protected]> Optimise apropos when given many arguments (Ubuntu bug #927028). * src/whatis.c (use_grep, do_whatis, parse_name, parse_whatis, do_apropos, search): Operate on multiple pages. (use_grep, do_whatis, do_apropos): Update an output array rather than returning an int. (parse_name, parse_whatis): Update an output array as well as returning an int. (display, do_whatis_section): Constify page argument. (match): Constify lowpage and whatis arguments. (main): Process all arguments using a single call to search. * NEWS: Document this. I've yet to work on path resolution in whatis, but that should be easy. ** Changed in: man-db (Ubuntu) Status: Triaged => Fix Committed ** Changed in: man-db (Ubuntu) Assignee: (unassigned) => Colin Watson (cjwatson) -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/927028 Title: 'apropos' maxes out CPU when run with '/bin/*' as argument To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/man-db/+bug/927028/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
