berkeley

[utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!unix-wizards]

>From day at 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