apropos(1) - NetBSD Manual Pages

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APROPOS(1)              NetBSD General Commands Manual              APROPOS(1)


NAME

     apropos -- search the complete content of all man pages


SYNOPSIS

     apropos [-123456789hilMmPpr] [-C path] [-n results] [-S machine]
             [-s section] query


DESCRIPTION

     The apropos utility performs a full text search over the complete content
     of all man pages.  It uses the FTS engine of SQLite to perform the
     search.  The database is created with the help of the makemandb(8) util-
     ity.

     This implementation of the apropos utility is more sophisticated than the
     classical version.  Like modern search applications, it uses advanced
     techniques like stemming and term weighting to rank the matching results
     in decreasing order of relevance.

     Quotes are optional for specifying multiword queries.

     It supports the following options:

     -1, ..., -9
                 Limit the search to the specified section of the manual.  By
                 default, pages from all sections are shown.  These options
                 are abbreviations for the -s option for single digit sec-
                 tions.

     -C path     Use different man(1) configuration file than the default,
                 /etc/man.conf.

     -h          Turn on html formatting.

     -i          Turn on terminal escape code formatting.

     -l          Legacy mode: Only searches name and name description.  Does
                 not print context and turns off formatting.

     -M          Do not show the context of the match.

     -m          Show the context of the match (default).

     -n results  Output up to the specified number of search results.  The
                 default limit is infinity.

     -P          Turn on pager formatting.

     -p          Turn on pager formatting, and pipe the results through a
                 pager (defaulting to more(1)).

     -r          Turn off formatting.

     -S machine  Limit the search to the pages for the specified machine
                 architecture.  By default pages for all architectures are
                 shown in the search results.

     -s section  Limit the search to the specified section of the manual.  By
                 default, pages from all sections are shown.  For single digit
                 sections you can use abbreviations: -1, ..., -9.


FILES

     /etc/man.conf  The location of the SQLite FTS database can be configured
                    using the _mandb tag.


ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

     APROPOS          This environment variable is white-space tokenized as an
                      argument vector and the options in it are parsed and
                      set.  Command line options override the environment
                      options.

     PAGER            The pagination command used for writing the output,
                      should this be requested.  If the PAGER environment
                      variable is null or not set, the standard pagination
                      program more(1) will be used.


SEE ALSO

     man(1), whatis(1), man.conf(5), makemandb(8)


HISTORY

     The apropos command appeared in 3BSD.  It was rewritten in NetBSD 6.0 to
     support full text search using SQLite.


AUTHORS

     Abhinav Upadhyay

NetBSD 10.1                      May 17, 2022                      NetBSD 10.1