Beginner hint: finding manual pages when you don't know the program.

[Tom Mitchell <mitch48 sbcglobal net>]

On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 12:15:21PM -0400, Trevor Smith wrote:
....
> It's hard to find man pages when you don't know the name of the
> program. :-)

The command "apropos", "man -k" or "whatis" should find useful key
words letting you find find man pages when you don't know the name of
a program.

Example:
Try "apropos partition"
 # apropos partition
 GNU Parted [parted]  (8)  - a partition manipulation program
 ...
 fdisk                (8)  - Partition table manipulator for Linux
 ...

Sadly not all man pages have a good description line in the "NAME"
section of the man pages yet.  IMO, it is good to file a bug
suggesting a better NAME section to be indexed by "makewhatis".

Note that "makewhatis" has some mixed language abilities.  That the
global community may value.  See the "makewhatis" man page for the
context of this line:

	LANGUAGE=fi:fr:it makewhatis -w

-- 
	T o m  M i t c h e l l 
	mitch48-at-sbcglobal-dot-net