For those learning OS X or other Unixy based systems, and for those who have been using them for decades, man is one of the most important commands in our arsenal. The man command is short for manual and shows us how to use each command that has a man page, or a page that acts as an instruction manual for the command (or method). Another command, apropos, searches the whatis database for objects that match a string, or entry. For example, if you’d like to see a listing of all man pages that reference the word case, use the following command: apropos case Or use whatis in the place…
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Apropos and OS X
The apropos command is used to search for strings in the whatis database. The whatis database is compiled by the makewhatis command, which searches for names and descriptions of all the man pages from a directory you specify as part of the command (optionally, or just defaults to /usr/share/man) and throws them into the database. Apropos then searches these strings and lists a short descriptor. If you’re thinking that I shouldn’t be lazy and I should remember every single command in Mac OS X, well, while I’d love to, but I have to point out that there are a lot of them… Also, I’ve learned that there are some very…