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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

> "ip" is useless as a keyword

Most docs will mention iproute2. You can use that for googling.

On my CentOS 7 system, there is no iproute2 package, but there is an iproute package. Neither 'man iproute' nor 'man iproute2' produce any man pages. The iproute package provides the contents of /etc/iproute2, among other things, so why is the package name just iproute? The man page for ip has the name iproute2 at the very bottom, where it is easily missed. It would never have occurred to me to look for either iproute or iproute2 for information on ip had I not come across this posting. A little consistency of naming, with better cross referencing, would sure be nice...

What you're describing seems like an inexcusable state of affairs, but as a practical matter `man -k <search term>` or `apropos <search term>` is useful for finding poorly named manpages.

Of course in the specific case of "ip", both are going to return quite a haystack to search through...

Yeah that’s what I loved about this article, I finally know what to google.

Future tip: your package manager should be able to find this for you, for example:

> $ which ip

> /sbin/ip

> $ dpkg -S /sbin/ip

> iproute2: /sbin/ip

You may also want 'whereis' instead of 'which'.

I use cope to colorize my output, which makes 'which' useless to me for most common commands, but 'whereis' still works.

Edit for examples:

    $ which ip
    /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl/auto/share/dist/Cope/ip
    $ whereis ip
    ip: /usr/bin/ip /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl/auto/share/dist/Cope/ip /usr/share/man/man7/ip.7.gz /usr/share/man/man8/ip.8.gz

> whereis

Thanks for this! After 14+ years of using Linux almost daily, I had never heard of this command. I learned something new today, so now it's time to go home!

Yeah, I recently "discovered" the commands 'whatis' [0] and 'apropos' [1] and my experience learning Linux improved quite a bit.

[0] https://linux.die.net/man/1/whatis

[1] https://linux.die.net/man/1/apropos

Thanks for passing those on as well!

In bash, there's also:

    command -V

Which knows about aliases and functions as well:

    $ command -V ip
    ip is /sbin/ip
    $ command -V ll
    ll is aliased to `ls -AlF --color=auto'
    $ command -V command_not_found_handle
    command_not_found_handle is a function
    command_not_found_handle ()
    {
        if [ -x /usr/lib/command-not-found ]; then
            /usr/lib/command-not-found -- "$1";
            return $?;
        else
            if [ -x /usr/share/command-not-found/command-not-found ]; then
                /usr/share/command-not-found/command-not-found -- "$1";
                return $?;
            else
                printf "%s: command not found\n" "$1" 1>&2;
                return 127;
            fi;
        fi
    }

I finally found out how to get netstat on these dang new systemd machines! :)

That's a good tip, thanks.

That being said while docs specifically written about the tool will probably mention it random forum posts, tutorials or even stackoverflow questions may not.

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