NAME

apropos − locate commands by keyword lookup

SYNOPSIS

apropos [ −a ] keyword ... 

DESCRIPTION

Apropos shows which manual sections contain instances of any of the given keywords in their title.  Each word is considered separately and case of letters is ignored.  Words which are part of other words are considered; thus, when looking for compile, apropos will find all instances of ‘compiler’ also.  Try

apropos password

and

apropos editor

If the line starts ‘name(section) ...’ you can do ‘man section name’ to get the documentation for it.  Try ‘apropos format’ and then ‘man 3s printf’ to get the manual on the subroutine printf.  Normally, apropos checks database files ‘whatis’.  The directory containing ‘whatis’ database is indicated by a environment variable LANG (e. g. /usr/man/ja_JP.SJIS).  And then apropos checks standard locations for manual information (/usr/man/C).  If /usr/man/C does not exist, /usr/man is checked.  If LANG is ‘ja_JP.SJIS’ or ‘ja_JP.EUC’, apropos checks another KANJI code ‘whatis’ database in case of not existing the directory indicated bu LANG.  And in this case, apropos converts from Shift JIS code to Japanese EUC code, or does the opposite conversion.  −a forces apropos to check only ‘/usr/man/C/whatis’. 

Apropos is actually just the −k option to the man(1) command.

FILES

/usr/man/∗/whatisdata base

SEE ALSO

man(1), whatis(1), catman(8), setlocale(3)

AUTHOR

William Joy

NEWS-OSRelease 4.1C