The whatis command in Linux

ID: 313

Category: Linux Terminal

Added: 25th of July 2022

Updated On: Tutorial updated and rechecked on 2nd of April 2024

Views: 1,288

If you want information about a package or command you can use the man command (Manual Pages).

You will find a manual page for almost every single package you installed in your Linux Distribution and Linux commands.

To display the manual page for the ls command enter the following in the terminal

whatis is a new command I recently stumbled across. The whatis command outputs a brief one line description of the package or command extracted from the manual page.

Enter the following command in the terminal


Output


Here is another example using the whatis command


Output


Here is an example below