NAME
apropos —
search the complete content
of all man pages
SYNOPSIS
apropos |
[-123456789hilMmPpr]
[-C path]
[-n
results]
[-S
machine]
[-s
section] query |
DESCRIPTION
The
apropos utility performs a full text search over the
complete content of all man pages. It uses the FTS engine of Sqlite to perform
the search. The database is created with the help of the
makemandb(8) utility.
This implementation of the
apropos utility is more
sophisticated than the classical version. Like modern search applications, it
uses advanced techniques like stemming and term weighting to rank the matching
results in decreasing order of relevance.
Quotes are optional for specifying multiword queries.
It supports the following options:
-
-
- -[1-9]
- Search only within the specified section of manual
pages.
-
-
- -C
path
- Use different
man(1) configuration file than
the default, /etc/man.conf.
-
-
- -h
- Turn on html formatting.
-
-
- -i
- Turn on terminal escape code formatting.
-
-
- -l
- Legacy mode: Only searches name and name description. Does
not print context and turns off formatting.
-
-
- -M
- Do not show the context of the match.
-
-
- -m
- Show the context of the match (default).
-
-
- -n
results
- Output up to the specified number of search results. The
default limit is infinity.
-
-
- -P
- Turn on pager formatting.
-
-
- -p
- Turn on pager formatting, and pipe the results through a
pager (defaulting to
more(1)).
-
-
- -r
- Turn off formatting.
-
-
- -S
machine
- Limit the search to the pages for the specified machine
architecture. By default pages for all architectures are shown in the
search results.
-
-
- -s
section
- Restrict the search to the specified section of the manual.
By default, pages from all sections are shown. This option is for
backwards compatibility with the classic version of apropos, using it is
equivalent to using the [123456789] options
directly.
FILES
- /etc/man.conf
- The location of the Sqlite
FTS database can be configured using the _mandb
tag.
ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
The
APROPOS
environment variable is white-space
tokenized as an argument vector and the options in it are parsed and set.
Command line options override the environment options.
SEE ALSO
man(1),
whatis(1),
man.conf(5),
makemandb(8)
HISTORY
The
apropos command appeared in 3.0BSD. It was rewritten in
NetBSD 6.0 to support full text search using Sqlite.
AUTHORS
Abhinav Upadhyay