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: 1,169
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
man ls
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
whatis ls
Output
ls (1) - list directory contents
Here is another example using the whatis command
whatis lsb_release
Output
lsb_release (1) - print distribution-specific information
Here is an example below
