whatis
—
describe what a command is
whatis |
[-C path]
command ... |
The whatis
program queries the apropos database built by
makemandb(8). It searches for
manual pages with name command and outputs name of the
matching manual pages along with the section and the brief description from
the NAME section.
It supports the following options:
-C
path
- Use different man(1)
configuration file than the default,
/etc/man.conf.
- /etc/man.conf
- The location of the Sqlite FTS database can be configured using the
_mandb
tag.
The whatis
command appeared in 3.0BSD. It was rewritten
in NetBSD 6.0 to use the SQLite index created by
makemandb(8).