Open System Services Shell and Utilities Reference Manual (G06.27+, H06.04+)

User Commands (v - z) whatis(1)
NAME
whatis - Describes a command’s function
SYNOPSIS
whatis [-M pathname][keyword ...]
The whatis command looks up a keyword, which may be a command, system call, library
function, special filename, or POSIX regular expression and displays the NAME line from
the reference page. You can then issue the man command to display additional information.
FLAGS
-M pathname
Specifies an alternative search path. The search path is a list of directories, separated
by : (colons), in which whatis expects to find the standard manual subdirectories.
DESCRIPTION
The whatis command is equivalent to the man command with the -f flag.
The keyword argument can be a POSIX regular expression. For more information, see the grep
reference page.
EXAMPLES
To find out what function the ls command performs, enter:
whatis ls
FILES
/usr/share/man/whatis Keyword database.
RELATED INFORMATION
Commands: man(1).
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