A
nifty Unix command that gives you a
short description of a given system command. From the
man page of
GNU whatis:
NAME
whatis - search the whatis database for complete words.
SYNOPSIS
whatis keyword ...
DESCRIPTION
whatis searches a set of database files containing short
descriptions of system commands for keywords and displays
the result on the standard output. Only complete word
matches are displayed.
The whatis database is created using the command
/usr/sbin/makewhatis.
SEE ALSO
apropos(1), man(1).