APROPOS(1)                  386BSD Reference Manual                 APROPOS(1)

NAME
     apropos - locate commands by keyword lookup

SYNOPSIS
     apropos [-M path] [-m path] keyword ...

DESCRIPTION
     Apropos shows which manual pages contain instances of any of the given
     keyword(s) in their title line.  Each word is considered separately and
     case of letters is ignored.  Words which are part of other words are
     considered; when looking for ``compile'', apropos will also list all
     instances of ``compiler''.

     If the line output by apropos starts ``name(section) ...'' you can enter
     ``man section name'' to get its documentation.

     The options are as follows:

     -M      Override the list of standard directories apropos searches for a
             database named whatis.db. The supplied path must be a colon ``:''
             separated list of directories.  This search path may also be set
             using the environment variable MANPATH.

     -m      Augment the list of standard directories apropos searches for its
             database.  The supplied path must be a colon ``:'' separated list
             of directories.  These directories will be searched before the
             standard directories or the directories supplied with the -M
             option or the MANPATH environment variable are searched.

ENVIRONMENT
     MANPATH  The standard search path used by man(1) may be overridden by
              specifying a path in the MANPATH environment variable.  The
              format of the path is a colon ``:'' separated list of
              directories.

FILES
     whatis.db  name of the apropos database

SEE ALSO
     man(1),  whatis(1),  whereis(1)

HISTORY
     The apropos command appeared in 3.0BSD.

                                March 14, 1991                               1