WHATIS(1)                                              Manual pager utils                                              WHATIS(1)



NAME
       whatis - display manual page descriptions

SYNOPSIS
       whatis [-dlhvV] [-r|-w] [-s section] [-m system[,...]] [-M path] [-L locale] [-C file] name ...

DESCRIPTION
       Each  manual  page  has  a short description available within it.  whatis searches the manual page names and displays the
       manual page descriptions of any name matched.

       name may contain wildcards (-w) or be a regular expression (-r).  Using these options, it may be necessary to  quote  the
       name or escape (\) the special characters to stop the shell from interpreting them.

       index  databases  are used during the search, and are updated by the mandb program.  Depending on your installation, this
       may be run by a periodic cron job, or may need to be run manually after new manual pages have been installed.  To produce
       an old style text whatis database from the relative index database, issue the command:

       whatis -M manpath -w '*' | sort > manpath/whatis

       where manpath is a manual page hierarchy such as /usr/man.

OPTIONS
       -d, --debug
              Print debugging information.

       -v, --verbose
              Print verbose warning messages.

       -r, --regex
              Interpret  each  name  as  a regular expression.  If a name matches any part of a page name, a match will be made.
              This option causes whatis to be somewhat slower due to the nature of database searches.

       -w, --wildcard
              Interpret each name as a pattern containing shell style wildcards.  For a match to be made, an expanded name  must
              match  the  entire  page  name.   This  option  causes  whatis to be somewhat slower due to the nature of database
              searches.

       -l, --long
              Do not trim output to the terminal width.  Normally, output will be truncated to the terminal width to avoid  ugly
              results from poorly-written NAME sections.

       -s section, --section section
              Search only the given manual section.  If section is a simple section, for example "3", then the displayed list of
              descriptions will include pages in sections "3", "3perl", "3x", and so on; while if section has an extension,  for
              example "3perl", then the list will only include pages in that exact part of the manual section.

       -m system[,...], --systems=system[,...]
              If  this  system has access to other operating system's manual page names, they can be accessed using this option.
              To search NewOS's manual page names, use the option -m NewOS.

              The system specified can be a combination of comma delimited operating system names.  To include a search  of  the
              native operating system's manual page names, include the system name man in the argument string.  This option will
              override the $SYSTEM environment variable.

       -M path, --manpath=path
              Specify an alternate set of colon-delimited manual page hierarchies to search.  By default, whatis uses the  $MAN-
              PATH  environment  variable,  unless  it is empty or unset, in which case it will determine an appropriate manpath
              based on your $PATH environment variable.  This option overrides the contents of $MANPATH.

       -L locale, --locale=locale
              whatis will normally determine your current locale by a call to the C  function  setlocale(3)  which  interrogates
              various  environment variables, possibly including $LC_MESSAGES and $LANG.  To temporarily override the determined
              value, use this option to supply a locale string directly to whatis.  Note that it will not take effect until  the
              search  for  pages  actually  begins.   Output  such as the help message will always be displayed in the initially
              determined locale.

       -C file, --config-file=file
              Use this user configuration file rather than the default of ~/.manpath.

       -h, --help
              Print a help message and exit.

       -V, --version
              Display version information.

EXIT STATUS
       0      Successful program execution.

       1      Usage, syntax or configuration file error.

       2      Operational error.

       16     Nothing was found that matched the criteria specified.

ENVIRONMENT
       SYSTEM If $SYSTEM is set, it will have the same effect as if it had been specified as the argument to the -m option.

       MANPATH
              If $MANPATH is set, its value is interpreted as the colon-delimited manual page hierarchy search path to use.

       MANWIDTH
              If $MANWIDTH is set, its value is used as the terminal width (see the --long option).  If it is not set, the  ter-
              minal  width will be calculated using an ioctl(2) if available, the value of $COLUMNS, or falling back to 80 char-
              acters if all else fails.

FILES
       /usr/share/man/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)
              A traditional global index database cache.

       /var/cache/man/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)
              An FHS compliant global index database cache.

       /usr/share/man/.../whatis
              A traditional whatis text database.

SEE ALSO
       apropos(1), man(1), mandb(8).

AUTHOR
       Wilf. (G.WilfordATee.uk).
       Fabrizio Polacco (fpolaccoATdebian.org).
       Colin Watson (cjwatsonATdebian.org).



2.5.7                                                      2010-02-16                                                  WHATIS(1)