What happened to 'apropos' in Mandrake?

tur third · 06-21-2005, 03:17 AM

I did have Slackware installed on my pc and used to use the command:

apropos something

It would then list the programs and I then could type

program --help

to find out how to run it etc.

When I try this in Mandrake 10.1 community, as SU in a terminal, it does not find anything.

Do I need to do something to set this up?

theYinYeti · 06-21-2005, 04:58 AM

apropos reads its data from a database file (read the apropos man page for details). If I remember correctly, the command to generate the database is mkwhatis, and should be run regularly (cron for example).

Yves.

tur third · 06-29-2005, 04:00 AM

Thanks, I have found how to to build the database now:

/usr/sbin/makewhatis