3 basic bash commands that will improve your life

#3: apropos command

TLDR: gimme the command

apropos [RELATED_KEYWORD]
apropos [RELATED_KEYWORD] | grep -i [KEYWORD]

Explanation

Let’s say you are looking a bash command related to a particular topic, you don’t know the command you need but you have a keyword in mind that you think this command will be relevant to, what do you do ? Enter apropos command which searches the manual page descriptions for the given keyword and returns a list of commands that match.

apropos network

Here’s an example of how we can use it for looking for commands related to networking

As you can see it returns us a quite extensive result. Now let’s say we want to refine this to only have commands that have status in the name, we can use grep -i [KEYWORD] for that. The whole command becomes this:

apropos network | grep -i status

here is the result we get:

Now this looks way more managable, we have reduced our block of text to 3 entries.

Bonus tip: using grep to further refine our search

Now that we narrowed down our entry, why not do the same with manual page for networkctl?

let’s say we do not wish to scan through the entire manual page of networkctl, why not use grep to return us the information about a particular flag? Let’s use this code

cleman networkctl | grep -e "all"

Mind you this isn’t always useful but still a good idea to have this in the back pocket.

The overview