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Q: avoid getting answers from apropos in the man sections 3 and 3x

From Sándor Bárány

Answered By Mike Orr

Dear Answer Gang,

I am looking for a way to avoid getting answers to my apropos queries from the man sections 3 and 3x (ie I want to see only command names and no APIs). How can I do that without statically removing those man sections?

Regards,

S aacute;ndor B aacute;r aacute;ny

[Mike] If you want to see only a certain section, you can pass that as the second argument to "man". For instance, "crontab" has two pages. "man 5 crontab" shows the file format, and "man 1 crontab" (or "man 8 crontab" on some systems) shows the command.

Apropos doesn't have any options, but man can be called as:


man -S 1:5:8 MyCommand
man --sections=1:5:8 MyCommand

to make it search only certain sections. In this case, it will display the first file it finds.

The easiest way to do what you want would be to have a shell script or function that greps the output of "apropos" to remove the unwanted lines:


#!/bin/sh
apropos $* | fgrep -v '(3)
(3X)'

Or if you like regular expressions:


#!/bin/sh
apropos $* | egrep -v '\((3|3X)\)'

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Published in issue 71 of Linux Gazette October 2001

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