WHATIS(1) BSD General Commands Manual WHATIS(1)NAMEwhatis — describe what a command is
SYNOPSISwhatis [-M path] [-m path] command ...
DESCRIPTION
Whatis looks up a given command and gives the header line from the manual
page. You can then use the man(1) command to get more information.
The options are as follows:
-M path Override the list of standard directories whatis searches for
its database named “whatis.db”. The supplied path must be a
colon “:” separated list of directories. This search path
may also be set using the environment variable MANPATH.
-m path Augment the list of standard directories whatis searches for
its database named “whatis.db”. The supplied path must be a
colon “:” separated list of directories. These directories
will be searched before the standard directories or the
directories supplied with the -M option or the MANPATH envi‐
ronment variable are searched.
ENVIRONMENT
MANPATH The standard search path used by man(1) may be overridden by
specifying a path in the MANPATH environment variable.
FILES
whatis.db name of the whatis database
SEE ALSOapropos(1), man(1), whereis(1)HISTORY
The whatis command appeared in 3.0BSD.
4th Berkeley Distribution June 6, 1993 4th Berkeley Distribution