Updated: 2022/Sep/29

Please read Privacy Policy. It's for your privacy.


WHATIS(1)                   General Commands Manual                  WHATIS(1)

NAME
     whatis - describe what a command is

SYNOPSIS
     whatis [-C path] command ...

DESCRIPTION
     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.

FILES
     /etc/man.conf  The location of the SQLite FTS database can be configured
                    using the _mandb tag.

SEE ALSO
     apropos(1), man(1), man.conf(5), makemandb(8)

HISTORY
     The whatis command appeared in 3.0BSD.  It was rewritten in NetBSD 6.0 to
     use the SQLite index created by makemandb(8).

NetBSD 10.99                     June 16, 2016                    NetBSD 10.99