17. whatis

Lesson Content

Whew, we’ve learned quite a bit of commands so far, if you are ever feeling doubtful about what a command does, you can use the whatis command. The whatis command provides a brief description of command line programs.

$ whatis cat

The description gets sourced from the manual page of each command. If you ran whatis cat, you’d see there is a small blurb with a short description.

Exercise

Run the whatis command on the less command.

Quiz Question