.\" Man page for whatis .\" .\" Copyright (c) 1990, 1991, John W. Eaton. .\" .\" You may distribute under the terms of the GNU General Public .\" License as specified in the README file that comes with the man 1.0 .\" distribution. .\" .\" John W. Eaton .\" jwe@che.utexas.edu .\" Department of Chemical Engineering .\" The University of Texas at Austin .\" Austin, Texas 78712 .\" .TH whatis 1 "September 19, 2005" .LO 1 .SH NAME whatis \- search the whatis database for complete words. .SH SYNOPSIS .BI whatis keyword ... .SH DESCRIPTION whatis searches a set of database files containing short descriptions of system commands for keywords and displays the result on the standard output. Only complete word matches are displayed. The whatis database is created using the command /usr/libexec/makewhatis. .SH AUTHOR John W. Eaton was the original author of .BR "man" . Zeyd M. Ben-Halim released man 1.2, and Andries Brouwer followed up with versions 1.3 thru 1.5p. Federico Lucifredi <flucifredi@acm.org> is the current maintainer. .SH "SEE ALSO" apropos(1), man(1).