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 catThe 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
# What command can you use to see a small description of a command?
> The whatis command looks up a given command, system call, library function, or special file name, as specified by the Command parameter.
1. [ ] why
2. [ ] what
3. [ ] help
4. [x] whatis