On Sun, 17 Mar 2024 06:30:15 -0500 Rob Landley <r...@landley.net> wrote: > On 3/15/24 17:48, enh wrote: > > i remember when apropros(1) was useful... > > > > ~$ apropos nice > > nice: nothing appropriate. > > ~$ > > > > :-( > > Sadly arpopos requires some silly cron job to create a database, but > instead of adapting that for the invention of package management (so > the database got updated when packages were installed/removed) they > left it as a cron job, which bogged down everybody's systems and got > shot in the head when laptops overtook desktops. (Ooh, I wrote a rant > about that long ago, I think laptops outsold desktops in dollar terms > in 2004 and unit volume in 2005, but it's been long enough I don't > remember, and that was pre-twitter and before my website blog, so the > rant with actual reference URLs would have been either on livejournal > or some mailing list...) > > That said, there's no real reason NOT to update apropos to work based > on job control. (Modulo rebuilding the whole database each package > install was considered too expensive and nobody ever did a delta > version.) > > In theory "man man" should tell you to look at "man 1 intro", but for > some INSANE reason that still mentions the existence of "info" files > (based on the gopher protocol) and thus 100% irrelevant as of about > 1996. > > There SHOULD be a tool to list all available commands with a one line > summary the way "aptitude search ." can show you every debian package > in the repository (which is how I know, piping it to wc, there are > 74,750 of them in devuan botulism, yes I still need to upgrade to > diptheria). > > In THEORY each man page has a "name" section with a one line > description, and there should be a way to emit them all, but if > there's a standard way to do it without writing a shell script I > dunno what it is. I generally just do
It looks like apropos is just man -k. $ man -k nice CGI::Pretty (3pm) - module to produce nicely formatted HTML code English (3perl) - use nice English (or awk) names for ugly punctuation v... ionice (1) - set or get process I/O scheduling class and priority nice (1) - run a program with modified scheduling priority nice (2) - change process priority renice(1) - alter priority of running processes snice(1) - send a signal or report process status $apropos nice CGI::Pretty (3pm) - module to produce nicely formatted HTML code English (3perl) - use nice English (or awk) names for ugly punctuation v... ionice (1) - set or get process I/O scheduling class and priority nice (1) - run a program with modified scheduling priority nice (2) - change process priority renice(1) - alter priority of running processes snice(1) - send a signal or report process status Lots of not so useful output though: $ apropos ls | wc -l 548 $ man -k ls | wc -l 548 Regards, Ivo _______________________________________________ Toybox mailing list Toybox@lists.landley.net http://lists.landley.net/listinfo.cgi/toybox-landley.net