WHATIS
Section: Manual pager utils (1)
Updated: 2010-02-16
NAME
whatis - display manual page descriptions
SYNOPSIS
whatis
[-dlhvV]
[-r|-w]
[-s
section]
[-m
system[,...]]
[-M
path]
[-L
locale]
[-C
file]
name
...
DESCRIPTION
Each manual page has a short description available within it.
whatis
searches the manual page names and displays the manual page descriptions
of any
name
matched.
name
may contain wildcards
(-w)
or be a regular expression
(-r).
Using these options, it may be necessary to quote the
name
or escape (\) the special characters to stop the shell from interpreting
them.
index
databases are used during the search, and are updated by the
mandb
program.
Depending on your installation, this may be run by a periodic cron job, or
may need to be run manually after new manual pages have been installed.
To produce an old style text
whatis
database from the relative
index
database, issue the command:
whatis -M
manpath
-w '*' | sort >
manpath/whatis
where
manpath
is a manual page hierarchy such as
/usr/man.
OPTIONS
- -d, --debug
-
Print debugging information.
- -v, --verbose
-
Print verbose warning messages.
- -r, --regex
-
Interpret each
name
as a regular expression.
If a
name
matches any part of a page name, a match will be made.
This option causes
whatis
to be somewhat slower due to the nature of database searches.
- -w, --wildcard
-
Interpret each
name
as a pattern containing shell style wildcards.
For a match to be made, an expanded
name
must match the entire page name.
This option causes
whatis
to be somewhat slower due to the nature of database searches.
- -l, --long
-
Do not trim output to the terminal width.
Normally, output will be truncated to the terminal width to avoid ugly
results from poorly-written
NAME
sections.
- -s section, --section section
-
Search only the given manual section.
If
section
is a simple section, for example "3", then the displayed list of
descriptions will include pages in sections "3", "3perl", "3x", and so on;
while if
section
has an extension, for example "3perl", then the list will only include
pages in that exact part of the manual section.
-m
system [,...],
--systems=system[,...]
-
If this system has access to other operating system's manual page names,
they can be accessed using this option.
To search NewOS's manual page names,
use the option
-m
NewOS.
The
system
specified can be a combination of comma delimited operating system names.
To include a search of the native operating system's
manual page names, include the system name
man
in the argument string.
This option will override the
$SYSTEM
environment variable.
- -M path, --manpath=path
-
Specify an alternate set of colon-delimited manual page hierarchies to
search.
By default,
whatis
uses the
$MANPATH
environment variable, unless it is empty or unset, in which case it will
determine an appropriate manpath based on your
$PATH
environment variable.
This option overrides the contents of
$MANPATH.
- -L locale, --locale=locale
-
whatis
will normally determine your current locale by a call to the C function
setlocale(3)
which interrogates various environment variables, possibly including
$LC_MESSAGES
and
$LANG.
To temporarily override the determined value, use this option to supply a
locale
string directly to
whatis.
Note that it will not take effect until the search for pages actually
begins.
Output such as the help message will always be displayed in the initially
determined locale.
- -C file, --config-file=file
-
Use this user configuration file rather than the default of
~/.manpath.
- -h, --help
-
Print a help message and exit.
- -V, --version
-
Display version information.
EXIT STATUS
- 0
-
Successful program execution.
- 1
-
Usage, syntax or configuration file error.
- 2
-
Operational error.
- 16
-
Nothing was found that matched the criteria specified.
ENVIRONMENT
- SYSTEM
-
If
$SYSTEM
is set, it will have the same effect as if it had been specified as the
argument to the
-m
option.
- MANPATH
-
If
$MANPATH
is set, its value is interpreted as the colon-delimited manual page
hierarchy search path to use.
- MANWIDTH
-
If
$MANWIDTH
is set, its value is used as the terminal width (see the
--long
option).
If it is not set, the terminal width will be calculated using an
ioctl(2)
if available, the value of
$COLUMNS,
or falling back to 80 characters if all else fails.
FILES
- /usr/share/man/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)
-
A traditional global
index
database cache.
- /var/cache/man/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)
-
An FHS
compliant global
index
database cache.
- /usr/share/man/.../whatis
-
A traditional
whatis
text database.
SEE ALSO
apropos(1),
man(1),
mandb(8).
AUTHOR
Wilf. (G.Wilford@ee.surrey.ac.uk).
Fabrizio Polacco (fpolacco@debian.org).
Colin Watson (cjwatson@debian.org).
Index
- NAME
-
- SYNOPSIS
-
- DESCRIPTION
-
- OPTIONS
-
- EXIT STATUS
-
- ENVIRONMENT
-
- FILES
-
- SEE ALSO
-
- AUTHOR
-
This document was created by
man2html,
using the manual pages.
Time: 07:35:55 GMT, March 26, 2013