# man -k updatedb updatedb.conf (5) - a configuration file for updatedb(8) updatedb (8) - update a database for plocate
In the following example, I searched on the word “halt” and found a series of related commands.
# apropos halt halt (8) - Power off, reboot, or halt the machine poweroff (8) - Power off, reboot, or halt the machine reboot (8) - Power off, reboot, or halt the machine shutdown (8) - Halt, power off or reboot the machine systemd-halt.service (8) - System shutdown logic
Here’s an interesting set of commands that suggest that apropos may sometimes find more than you want to see. I searched on the term “host” and noticed that some of the returned descriptions included “ghost” instead of “host”. Whenever this kind of problem pops up, add the -e option to get an exact (whole word) match. Notice the difference in the response when I use this option. The second command below only counts commands when the description includes “host” as a complete word.
$ apropos host | wc -l 142 $ apropos -e host | wc -l 78
One of the problems you might encounter is when the apropos command responds with “nothing appropriate” regardless of what term you ask about. This means that man pages need to be created or updated.
