Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

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FWIW on Debian-like systems there is "apropos" that searches for binaries based on keywords in their descriptions. My problem is when I need it I can never remember the name, just spent 10 minutes search on variations of "advogato".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apropos_%28Unix%29 : "Often a wrapper for the "man -k" command, the apropos command is used to search all manual pages for the string specified. This is often useful if one knows the action that is desired, but does not remember the exact command or page name."

TBH learning now that "man -k" exists (I don't think I can have "man man"-ed in the last decade) is probably a lot more useful for me.

> FWIW on Debian-like systems there is "apropos"

Ouch, too much Debian credit, too much Linux credit, even. That's by Bill Joy circa 1977, so it's a BSD Unix thing, widely adopted everywhere else.

Man -k was AT&T's reaction to apropos, IIRC. There is a certain logic to using "man" to search man pages.

Except at least in Ubuntu they basically dont work eg man -k MANOPT should find the man(1) man page and doesnt on my system.

There's nothing broken about that. If you want to do full text search, do `man -K` instead of `man -k`. E.g.

    man -K MANOPT

Works for me on Ubuntu 14.04, though slowly so and I still have to ask the pager to search for it within the manpage which is opened. Because of this, I read the manpages when I know where to find what I'm looking for but otherwise just Google.

A far more severe problem IMO is the fact that many Linux distros ship without manpages in their default installs.

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