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apropos
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- Snippet from Wikipedia: Apropos (Unix)
In computing,
aproposis a command to search the man page files in Unix and Unix-like operating systems. Apropos takes its name from the French "à propos" (Latin "ad prōpositum") which means about. It is particularly useful when searching for commands without knowing their exact names.
Searches through headers of manpages for a string. It is equivalent to [[man]] -k.
Apropos is useful when you know what you want to do, but don't know the name of the tool required. For example: “apropos rename” gives lots of results, including this useful one:
mv (1) - move (rename) files
In computing, apropos is a command to search the man page files in Unix and Unix-like operating systems.
Behavior
Often a wrapper for the
man -k
command, the apropos command is used to search all manual pages for the string specified. This is often useful if one knows the action that is desired, but does not remember the exact command or page name.
Sample usage
The following example demonstrates the output of the apropos command: <source lang=“console”> $ apropos mount free (1) - Display amount of free and used memory in the system mklost+found (8) - create a lost+found directory on a mounted Linux second extended file system mount (8) - mount a file system mountpoint (1) - see if a directory is a mountpoint ntfsmount (8) - Read/Write userspace NTFS driver. sleep (1) - delay for a specified amount of time switch_root (8) - switch to another filesystem as the root of the mount tree. umount (8) - unmount file systems </source>
In this example, apropos is used to search for the string “mount”, and apropos returns the indicated man pages that include the term “mount”.
See also
External links
- <tt>Apropos</tt> at the LinuxQuestions.org wiki
Bibliography
External sites
- Linux apropos