WHATIS(1) MachTen Reference Manual WHATIS(1)

NAME
whatis - describe what a command is

SYNOPSIS
whatis [-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 di-
rectories supplied with the -M option or the MANPATH environ-
ment 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