What use are these (rpm) entries in 'man'?

Nalin Dahyabhai nalin at redhat.com
Thu Nov 1 22:31:14 UTC 2007


On Thu, Nov 01, 2007 at 02:49:56PM +0000, Chris G wrote:
> When I do a "man -k <xxxx>" on my Fedora 7 system to search for
> documentation about something I get quite a few responses which have
> "(rpm)" as the manual section.  These seem to be of little use becuase
> there isn't an actual corresponding man page as far as I can see.
[snip]
> So what is the point of these (rpm) entries?  Do they somehow indicate
> that there is some sort of documentation there, if so how do I get at
> it?

The "apropos" command (or "man -k") just does a quick search of the
"whatis" database, which isn't exactly the same as searching man pages.
The result is more or less what you would get from grepping the
/var/cache/man/whatis file directly.

As it turns out, we've been adding package names and summaries to the
whatis database for a while now (#175595).

Cheers,

Nalin




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