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My first week in college a distant relative of mine at the same school pulled me into the Sun lab. The sum-total of his instructions were: * This is how you lo
by jdludlow 14y ago
My first week in college a distant relative of mine at the same school pulled me into the Sun lab. The sum-total of his instructions were:
* This is how you log in.
* This is ls.
* This is cd.
* This is man.
* This is apropos.
* Learn vi.
* Have fun.
What came from that 5 minute intro to Unix has been applied orders of magnitude more often than anything from 5 years of an EE degree.
- xutopia 14y agoCan you explain to me what apropos does?
- shazow 14y agoThis is why `man` came before `apropos`. :P http://www.unix.com/man-page/Linux/1/apropos/ http://www.unix.com/man-page/Linux/1/apropos/
- anextio 14y agoIt searches for a keyword in the manpages and tells you what page contains the text. $ apropos printf fmtcheck(3) - sanitizes user-supplied printf(3)-style format string format(ntcl) - Format a string in the style of sprintf fwkpfv(1) - FireWire kprintf viewer fwprintf(3), swprintf(3), vfwprintf(3), vswprintf(3), vwprintf(3), wprintf(3) - formatted wide character output conversion printf(1) - formatted output printf(3), fprintf(3), sprintf(3), snprintf(3), asprintf(3), dprintf(3), vprintf(3), vfprintf(3), vsprintf(3), vsnprintf(3), vasprintf(3), vdprintf(3) - formatted output conversion wprintf_l(3), fwprintf_l(3), swprintf_l(3), vwprintf_l(3), vfwprintf_l(3), vswprintf_l(3) - formatted wide character output conversion
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Symmetry 14y agoIt lets you find other commands, basically. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apropos_(Unix) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apropos_(Unix)
- jdludlow 14y ago$ man apropos apropos searches a set of database files containing short descriptions of system commands for keywords and displays the result on the standard output. It answers the question "I wonder how to do [this English word]." For example: "I wonder how I copy a file." $ apropos copy Dumps out all of the matching entries from the man pages for the word "copy". If you just wanted general commands, as opposed to library functions, and assuming your system organizes man page sections in the typical manner, you can filter it down with: $ apropos copy | grep "(1)" cp (1) - copy files and directories cpio (1) - copy files to and from archives
- greyfade 14y agoInstead of using `grep "(1)"`, use the `-s` switch: $ apropos -s1 copy bsdcpio (1) - copy files to and from archives cp (1) - copy files and directories dd (1) - convert and copy a file ....
- barrkel 14y agoI think it's better to use grep. Knowing the options to apropos has very low value. Knowing grep has lots and lots of value.
- tomp 14y agoI agree. I have no idea how to use `find`. I always do `find . | grep whatever`, since I know the basics of grep.
- Dobbs 14y agoLearning find is a worthy investment. find ./ -name "*.log" -size +2G -ctime +3 | xargs -P 8 gzip Will find all log files over 2 gigs and older than 3 days. Then it will gzip them split across 8 parallel gzip processes.
- neckbeard 14y agoNot to detract from your point, which was similar to my intro to Unix, but I've always preferred 'man -k' to apropos, because it means remembering only one command plus it is slightly less typing.
- stack_underflow 14y ago'man -K' is also useful, for when you want to search the contents of man pages and not just the descriptions.