1WHATIS(1) Manual pager utils WHATIS(1)
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6 whatis - display one-line manual page descriptions
7
9 whatis [-dlv?V] [-r|-w] [-s list] [-m system[,...]] [-M path] [-L lo‐
10 cale] [-C file] name ...
11
13 Each manual page has a short description available within it. whatis
14 searches the manual page names and displays the manual page descrip‐
15 tions of any name matched.
16 name may contain wildcards (-w) or be a regular expression (-r). Using
18 these options, it may be necessary to quote the name or escape (\) the
19 special characters to stop the shell from interpreting them.
20 index databases are used during the search, and are updated by the
22 mandb program. Depending on your installation, this may be run by a
23 periodic cron job, or may need to be run manually after new manual
24 pages have been installed. To produce an old style text whatis data‐
25 base from the relative index database, issue the command:
26 whatis -M manpath -w '*' | sort > manpath/whatis
28 where manpath is a manual page hierarchy such as /usr/man.
30
32 -d, --debug
33 Print debugging information.
34 -v, --verbose
36 Print verbose warning messages.
37 -r, --regex
39 Interpret each name as a regular expression. If a name matches
40 any part of a page name, a match will be made. This option
41 causes whatis to be somewhat slower due to the nature of data‐
42 base searches.
43 -w, --wildcard
45 Interpret each name as a pattern containing shell style wild‐
46 cards. For a match to be made, an expanded name must match the
47 entire page name. This option causes whatis to be somewhat
48 slower due to the nature of database searches.
49 -l, --long
51 Do not trim output to the terminal width. Normally, output will
52 be truncated to the terminal width to avoid ugly results from
53 poorly-written NAME sections.
54 -s list, --sections=list, --section=list
56 Search only the given manual sections. list is a colon- or
57 comma-separated list of sections. If an entry in list is a sim‐
58 ple section, for example "3", then the displayed list of de‐
59 scriptions will include pages in sections "3", "3perl", "3x",
60 and so on; while if an entry in list has an extension, for exam‐
61 ple "3perl", then the list will only include pages in that exact
62 part of the manual section.
63 -m system[,...], --systems=system[,...]
65 If this system has access to other operating systems' manual
66 page names, they can be accessed using this option. To search
67 NewOS's manual page names, use the option -m NewOS.
68 The system specified can be a combination of comma delimited op‐
70 erating system names. To include a search of the native operat‐
71 ing system's manual page names, include the system name man in
72 the argument string. This option will override the $SYSTEM en‐
73 vironment variable.
74 -M path, --manpath=path
76 Specify an alternate set of colon-delimited manual page hierar‐
77 chies to search. By default, whatis uses the $MANPATH environ‐
78 ment variable, unless it is empty or unset, in which case it
79 will determine an appropriate manpath based on your $PATH envi‐
80 ronment variable. This option overrides the contents of $MAN‐
81 PATH.
82 -L locale, --locale=locale
84 whatis will normally determine your current locale by a call to
85 the C function setlocale(3) which interrogates various environ‐
86 ment variables, possibly including $LC_MESSAGES and $LANG. To
87 temporarily override the determined value, use this option to
88 supply a locale string directly to whatis. Note that it will
89 not take effect until the search for pages actually begins.
90 Output such as the help message will always be displayed in the
91 initially determined locale.
92 -C file, --config-file=file
94 Use this user configuration file rather than the default of
95 ~/.manpath.
96 -?, --help
98 Print a help message and exit.
99 --usage
101 Print a short usage message and exit.
102 -V, --version
104 Display version information.
105
107 0 Successful program execution.
108 1 Usage, syntax or configuration file error.
110 2 Operational error.
112 16 Nothing was found that matched the criteria specified.
114
116 SYSTEM If $SYSTEM is set, it will have the same effect as if it had
117 been specified as the argument to the -m option.
118 MANPATH
120 If $MANPATH is set, its value is interpreted as the colon-delim‐
121 ited manual page hierarchy search path to use.
122 See the SEARCH PATH section of manpath(5) for the default behav‐
124 iour and details of how this environment variable is handled.
125 MANWIDTH
127 If $MANWIDTH is set, its value is used as the terminal width
128 (see the --long option). If it is not set, the terminal width
129 will be calculated using the value of $COLUMNS, and ioctl(2) if
130 available, or falling back to 80 characters if all else fails.
131
133 /usr/share/man/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)
134 A traditional global index database cache.
135 /var/cache/man/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)
137 An FHS compliant global index database cache.
138 /usr/share/man/.../whatis
140 A traditional whatis text database.
141
143 apropos(1), man(1), mandb(8)
144
146 Wilf. (G.Wilford@ee.surrey.ac.uk).
147 Fabrizio Polacco (fpolacco@debian.org).
148 Colin Watson (cjwatson@debian.org).
149
151 https://gitlab.com/cjwatson/man-db/-/issues
152 https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?group=man-db
1532.10.0 2022-02-04 WHATIS(1)