apropos

[borgward512]

apropos and man -k both return "nothing appropriate" Is there something I need to do to make them work? Is there another method for finding appropriate commands for a subject in CentOs?

[aks]

What are you trying to search for?
(Example: apropos ls returns results, but apropos why_did_i_not_win_the_lottery doesn't)

[borgward512]

For example apropos printer

On a computer not running CentOs:

~ $ apropos printer
cups-browsed (8) - A daemon for browsing the Bonjour broadcasts of shared, remote CUPS printers
cups-calibrate (8) - ESP CUPS Printer Calibration Tool
cups-lpd (8) - receive print jobs and report printer status to lpd clients
cupsaddsmb (8) - export printers to samba for windows clients
cupsdisable (8) - stop/start printers and classes
cupsenable (8) - stop/start .........................
.......... and so on.

~ $ apropos network
interfaces (5) - network interface configuration for ifup and ifdown
aseqnet (1) - ALSA sequencer connectors over network
avahi-autoipd (8) - IPv4LL network address configuration daemon
byteorder (3) - convert values between host and network byte order
.............................................
.........................................................
tcpdump (8) - dump traffic on a network
tracepath (8) - traces path to a network host discovering MTU along this path
tracepath6 (8) - traces path to a network host discovering MTU along this path
traceroute6 (8) - traces path to a network host
traceroute6.iputils (8) - traces path to a network host
wget (1) - The non-interactive network downloader.
X (7) - a portable, network-transparent window system
~ $

In CentOs I get:

apropos printer - nothing appropriate

apropos network - nothing appropriate

Same results with man -k

[TrevorH]

Both need makewhatis to run before they will work. On an install of CentOS it puts an entry into /etc/cron.daily to run this (/etc/cron/daily/makewhatis.cron) but that entry will not run until about 04:00 the day after the install is completed. Until then neither apropos nor man -k will work. You can run the makewhatis entry manually if you want to speed this up.

[borgward512]

CentOs was installed on May 11 2017.

$ makewhatis
bash: makewhatis: command not found

[gerald_clark]

Install it next year along with the EOL CentOS 5.

[TrevorH]

Code: Select all

$ rpm -qf /etc/cron.daily/makewhatis.cron
man-1.6d-3.el5

[borgward512]

$ rpm -qf /etc/cron.daily/makewhatis.cron
man-1.6d-3.el5
$ man-1.6d-3.el5
bash: man-1.6d-3.el5: command not found

[TrevorH]

The rpm -qf command tells you what package owns a particular file. You can't a package name but you could try running /etc/cron.daily/makewhatis.cron instead.

[borgward512]

My Bad. I installed from CentOs 5.7 i386 bin DVD 1 of 2. I thought I checked it's md5sum, etc, but must have checked that of 2 of 2. Checksum of 1 of 2 does not match. The install did not require 2 of 2.

Looking to download 1 of 2 see 1 of 8 thru 8 of 8, they look like CD's. I see no 1 of 2 and 2 of 2. DVD's at http://archive.kernel.org/centos-vault/5.7/isos/i386/ I see CentOS-5.7-i386-bin-DVD.torrent 13-Sep-2011 00:49 319K What do I do with that?