On Unix-like operating systems, the whatis command displays short manual page descriptions.

This page covers the Linux version of whatis.

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.

  • Description
  • Syntax
  • Exit status
  • Environment
  • Examples
  • Related commands
  • Linux commands help

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 be run manually after new manual pages are installed. To produce an old style text whatis database from the relative index database, issue the command below:

whatis -M manpath -w ‘*’ | sort > manpath/whatis

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

Syntax

whatis [-dlhvV] [-r|-w] [-s list] [-m system[,…]] [-M path] [-L locale] [-C file] name …

Options

Exit status

Environment

Examples

whatis whatis

Display a description of what whatis is.

info — Read Info documents.man — Display the manual page of a given command.