apropos searches the manual pages for a keyword or regular expression.

Options

Each manual page has a short description included with it. apropos searches these descriptions for instances of keyword.

  • Options
  • Syntax
  • Examples
  • Related commands
  • Linux commands help

keyword is a regular expression (by default; also see the -r option), or may contain wildcards (-w), or be instructed to match the only exact keyword (-e). Using these options, it may be necessary to quote the keyword, or escape ("") the special characters to stop the shell from interpreting them.

The standard matching rules allow matches to be made against the page name and word boundaries in the description.

Syntax

apropos [-dalhvV] [-e|-w|-r] [-s list] [-m system[,…]] [-M path] [-L locale] [-C file] keyword …

Options

Environment

Examples

apropos find

Display all manual entries with the word “find” in the page name or description. Output resembles the following:

aa_find_mountpoint (2) - find where the apparmor interface filesystem is mounted chkdupexe (1) - find duplicate executables ffs (3) - find first bit set in a word ffsl (3) - find first bit set in a word ffsll (3) - find first bit set in a word find (1) - search for files in a directory hierarchy find2perl (1) - translate find command lines to Perl code findaffix (1) - Interactive spelling checking findfs (8) - find a filesystem by label or UUID findmnt (8) - find a filesystem findsmb (1) - list info about machines that respond to SMB name quer… glob (3) - find pathnames matching a pattern, free memory from gl… globfree (3) - find pathnames matching a pattern, free memory from gl… ippfind (1) - find internet printing protocol printers lfind (3) - linear search of an array locate (1) - find files by name memdiskfind (1) - utility to search for a MEMDISK instance mlocate (1) - find files by name mysql_find_rows (1) - extract SQL statements from files oldfind (1) - search for files in a directory hierarchy pidof (8) - find the process ID of a running program. texdoc (1) - find & view documentation in TeX Live tfind (3) - manage a binary tree tracediff (1) - find and print differences between two traces ttyslot (3) - find the slot of the current user’s terminal in some file

man — Display the manual page of a given command.