3 ms·

I recently discovered whatis and I love it.

• peterwwillis 13y ago
  Yup, it's a great way to review a lot of commands without reading every man page. Want to find all the tools on your system that use the curses library (for user-friendly interfaces)? Try this: for i in `\ls /bin/* /sbin/* /usr/bin/* /usr/sbin/* | sort -u` ; do ldd $i 2>/dev/null | grep -q curses && whatis `basename $i` ; done | grep -v 'nothing appropriate' Don't know how your current path finds a program? Use which: pwillis@zippy:~$ which df /usr/bin/df pwillis@zippy:~$ which mount /bin/mount Annoyed that /sbin and /usr/sbin aren't in your path? Use whereis: pwillis@zippy:~$ which ifconfig which: no ifconfig in (/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/lib64/kde4/libexec:/usr/kerberos/bin:/usr/lib64/java/bin:/usr/lib64/java/jre/bin:/usr/lib64/qt/bin:/usr/share/texmf/bin:.) pwillis@zippy:~$ whereis ifconfig ifconfig: /sbin/ifconfig /usr/man/man8/ifconfig.8.gz /usr/share/man/man8/ifconfig.8.gz /usr/X11/man/man8/ifconfig.8.gz
  • jlgreco 13y ago
    The zsh builtin 'where' is pretty good too: > where ls ls: aliased to ls --color=tty /usr/bin/ls /bin/ls
  • Wicher 13y ago
    Apropos 'which', let me show 'type -a': % type -a which which is a shell builtin which is /usr/bin/which Convenient if you really want to know what you'll be calling.