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whatis

Display one-line descriptions from manual pages.

Each manual page has a short description available within it. whatis searches the manual page names and displays the manual page descriptions of any name matched.

Cheatsheet​

# Display a description from a man page
whatis <𝗖𝗢𝗠𝗠𝗔𝗡𝗗>

# Don't cut the description dff at the end of the line
whatis -l <𝗖𝗢𝗠𝗠𝗔𝗡𝗗>

# Display descriptions for all commands matching a glob
whatis -w <𝗪𝗢𝗥𝗗>*

# Search manpage descriptions with a regular expression
whatis -r '<𝗥𝗘𝗚𝗘𝗫>'

# Display descriptions in a specific language
whatis -L <𝗟𝗔𝗡𝗚𝗨𝗔𝗚𝗘> <𝗖𝗢𝗠𝗠𝗔𝗡𝗗>

References​