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