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

SEE ALSO
apropos(1), man(1), whereis(1)

HISTORY
The whatis command appeared in 3.0BSD.

4th Berkeley Distribution June 6, 1993 1