Find out what those commands are for!

**adamm** · 06-03-2003, 10:08 PM

Have you ever wanted to know what the commands in these directories do:
/bin
/sbin
/usr/bin

There is a command called whatis and xargs, that can be used quite creatively to print out quick definitions of all the command in a directory.

Code:

ls | xargs whatis | less

Move to the bin directory of your choice and follow the example below:

Code:

root@0[/]# cd /bin
root@0[bin]# ls | xargs whatis | less
afio (1)             - manipulate archives and files
arch (1)             - print machine architecture
ash (1)              - a shell
ash.static: nothing appropriate.
bash (1)             - GNU Bourne-Again SHell
bsd-csh (1)          - a shell (command interpreter) with C-like syntax
bsh (1)              - a shell
cat (1)              - concatenate files and print on the standard output
chgrp (1)            - change group ownership

etc... etc... etc...

These will print out the whatis for every command in the directory you are in so you can get a quick overview of the commands listed.

Enjoy!

**gretchen** · 06-03-2003, 11:25 PM

THANK YOU!!

**adamm** · 06-04-2003, 12:50 AM

No problem!
This was a tip I learned a few years ago (I think) and it just popped back into my brain so I thought I would share it.

**aay** · 06-04-2003, 04:20 AM

I like "dpkg -l |less"

On a Debian system this will give you a list of all the packages you have installed on your machine with descriptions of what the package does.

For example:

ii 3270-common 3.2.17-2 Common files for IBM 3270 emulators {x,c,s,t
ii a2ps 4.13b-20 GNU a2ps - 'Anything to PostScript' converte
ii aalib-bin 1.4p5-17 sample programs using aalib
ii aalib1 1.4p5-17 ascii art library
ii abiword 1.9.0+cvs.2003 WYSIWYG word processor based on GTK2
ii abiword-common 1.9.0+cvs.2003 WYSIWYG word processor based on GTK2
ii ace-of-penguin 1.2-5 Solitaire-games with penguin-look
ii acme 2.0.3-1 Enables the "multimedia buttons" found on la
ii acroread 5.06-0.4 Adobe Acrobat Reader: Portable Document Form
ii adduser 3.50 Add and remove users and groups

The nice thing about this is that it also gives you the version of the package you have installed.

If you want to look up just one package, you can do this "dpkg -l packagename"

Ex. "dpkg -l cpio" yeilds

cpio 2.5-1 GNU cpio -- a program to manage archives of files.

**adam0ski** · 07-24-2003, 07:36 AM

polish translation of this article / polskie t?umaczenie tego artyku?u

http://debiandiary.aso.strefa.pl/vie...asc&highlight=

**noxfu** · 08-28-2003, 08:42 PM

xargs isn't necessary. You could do something like the following:

Code:

whatis `ls` |more

The backticks around ls are expanded out to the output of the command. Therefore, if you had a directory consisting of two files, foo and bar, `ls` would expand out to "foo bar". The full command, after being fully expanded, in this case, would be:

Code: