Copyright (c) 2011 Abhinav Upadhyay <er.abhinav.upadhyay (at] gmail.com>
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.Dd February 10, 2013 .Dt APROPOS 1 .Os .Sh NAME .Nm apropos .Nd search the complete content of all man pages .Sh SYNOPSIS .Nm .Op Fl 123456789Ccpr .Op Fl n Ar Number of results .Op Fl S Ar machine .Op Fl s Ar section .Ar query .Sh DESCRIPTION The .Nm utility performs a full text search over the complete content of all man pages. It uses the FTS engine of Sqlite to perform the search. The database is created with the help of .Xr makemandb 8 utility.
p This implementation of the .Nm utility is more sophisticated than the classical version of .Nm . Like modern search applications, it uses advanced techniques like stemming and term weighting to rank the matching results in decreasing order of relevance. By default .Nm will only display the top 10 matches in the output.
p Quotes are optional for specifying multiword queries.
p It supports the following options: l -tag -width indent t Fl 1 Search only within section 1 manual pages. t Fl 2 Search only within section 2 manual pages. t Fl 3 Search only within section 3 manual pages. t Fl 4 Search only within section 4 manual pages. t Fl 5 Search only within section 5 manual pages. t Fl 6 Search only within section 6 manual pages. t Fl 7 Search only within section 7 manual pages. t Fl 8 Search only within section 8 manual pages. t Fl 9 Search only within section 9 manual pages. t Fl C Do not show the context of the match. t Fl c Do show the context of the match (default). t Fl n Output up to the specified number of search results. The default limit is 10. t Fl p Display all matching results and pipe them through a pager (defaulting to .Xr more 1 ) . t Fl r On tty output don't issue any formatting escape codes. t Fl S Ar machine Limit the search to the pages for the specified machine architecture. By default pages for all architectures are shown in the search results. t Fl s Ar section Restrict the search to the specified section of the manual. By default, pages from all section are shown. This option is for backwards compatibility with the classic version of apropos, using it is equivalent to using the .Op 123456789 options directly. .El .Sh FILES l -hang -width /etc/man.conf -compact t Pa /etc/man.conf The location of the Sqlite FTS database can be configured using the .Cd _mandb tag. .El .Sh SEE ALSO .Xr man 1 , .Xr whatis 1 , .Xr makemandb 8 .Sh HISTORY The .Nm command appeared in 3.0BSD. It was rewritten in .Nx 6.0 to support full text search using Sqlite. .Sh AUTHORS .An Abhinav Upadhyay
Indexes created Tue Oct 28 09:09:52 GMT 2025