[Toybox] interesting new (?) env(1) options

[Ivo van Poorten]

On Sun, 17 Mar 2024 06:30:15 -0500 Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:
> On 3/15/24 17:48, enh wrote:
> > i remember when apropros(1) was useful...
> > 
> > ~$ apropos nice
> > nice: nothing appropriate.
> > ~$ 
> >  
> > :-(
> 
> Sadly arpopos requires some silly cron job to create a database, but
> instead of adapting that for the invention of package management (so
> the database got updated when packages were installed/removed) they
> left it as a cron job, which bogged down everybody's systems and got
> shot in the head when laptops overtook desktops. (Ooh, I wrote a rant
> about that long ago, I think laptops outsold desktops in dollar terms
> in 2004 and unit volume in 2005, but it's been long enough I don't
> remember, and that was pre-twitter and before my website blog, so the
> rant with actual reference URLs would have been either on livejournal
> or some mailing list...)
> 
> That said, there's no real reason NOT to update apropos to work based
> on job control. (Modulo rebuilding the whole database each package
> install was considered too expensive and nobody ever did a delta
> version.)
> 
> In theory "man man" should tell you to look at "man 1 intro", but for
> some INSANE reason that still mentions the existence of "info" files
> (based on the gopher protocol) and thus 100% irrelevant as of about
> 1996.
> 
> There SHOULD be a tool to list all available commands with a one line
> summary the way "aptitude search ." can show you every debian package
> in the repository (which is how I know, piping it to wc, there are
> 74,750 of them in devuan botulism, yes I still need to upgrade to
> diptheria).
> 
> In THEORY each man page has a "name" section with a one line
> description, and there should be a way to emit them all, but if
> there's a standard way to do it without writing a shell script I
> dunno what it is. I generally just do

It looks like apropos is just man -k.

$ man -k nice
CGI::Pretty (3pm)    - module to produce nicely formatted HTML code
English (3perl)      - use nice English (or awk) names for ugly
punctuation v...
ionice (1)           - set or get process I/O scheduling class and
priority
nice (1)             - run a program with modified scheduling priority
nice (2)             - change process priority
renice(1)            - alter priority of running processes
snice(1)             - send a signal or report process status

$apropos nice
CGI::Pretty (3pm)    - module to produce nicely formatted HTML code
English (3perl)      - use nice English (or awk) names for ugly
punctuation v...
ionice (1)           - set or get process I/O scheduling class and
priority
nice (1)             - run a program with modified scheduling priority
nice (2)             - change process priority
renice(1)            - alter priority of running processes
snice(1)             - send a signal or report process status

Lots of not so useful output though:

$ apropos ls | wc -l
548
$ man -k ls | wc -l
548

Regards,
Ivo