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Aucbvax.2780 fa.unix-wizards utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!unix-wizards Fri Aug 21 17:36:16 1981 berkeley >From day@RAND-UNIX Fri Aug 21 17:22:22 1981 Acidic as that guy's Datamation article was, some of the things he mentioned are well-known truths.

One of the things that we could fix is the problem with indexing the information from the man pages about what commands do what things. The Berkeley `apropos' commmand looks up a string in a file [/usr/lib/whatis] that contains a list of all the lines from the NAME section of all the man pages. Problem is, there isn't enough information in those entries. For instance, I wanted to find out if there was a command which would print the lines of a file in reverse order. I said `apropos reverse' and got: col (1) - filter reverse line feeds lastcomm (1) - show last commands executed in reverse order rev (1) - reverse lines of a file Rev(1) reverses the characters in each line; not what I wanted. Buried in the `tail' man page was the `-r' option that would do what I wanted. But how would you pack that information into the one-liner for tail: tail (1) - deliver the last part of a file

My suggestion is this: Add a new man page macro for keyword prhrases telling what the command can do, and make up /usr/lib/whatis from these entries. Each entry would have a list of keywords followed by a short synopsis line containing those words. The .SH macro would probably be changed to suppress printing of the KEYWORDS section.

Then someone has to go through all the man pages and add a KEYWORDS section.

--dave

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