apropos /kapropos command

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UltraKnorrie

Beginner

Posts: 2

Location: Belgium

Occupation: Academic

Friday, February 25th 2005, 9:27am

apropos /kapropos command

Hello KDE people,

I got a question. Every *nix knows the very useful command apropos. Certainly with nowadays distros, a large bunch of soft is installed on the fly when the OS gets installed. Apropos let's you search this heap of software quite quick giving you the idea if you need to consult sourceforge or another place of good software for that particular tool you are looking for, or if you already have that soft.

Helas, such a command does not exist for kde programs, although quite a lot of such programs doe exist as well. So does there exist a fast way to examine if you already have a KDE program which can do what you wanna have to be done (without using the rather cumbersome kpackagemanager) ? Or has someone plans to write a 'kapropos' ? (and kmakewhatis

) ? And with a kapropos, I mean a search tool that exclusively searchs amongst KDE-soft. (kpackagemanager searches through all rpms)

Best,

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wysota

Trainee

Posts: 65

Location: Warsaw, POLAND

Friday, February 25th 2005, 7:37pm

RE: apropos /kapropos command

You are mixing two things. Apropos doesn't tell you what software you have installed, but rather, what reference is available which is (in some way) asocciated with some string. I think you can in some way simulate it in KDE using kio_slaves -- locate, info and man (try to enter man:gcc in konquerors adress bar). You should use package managers to see what software you have, with exception that some soft can be installed without the package manager and it won't be visible then.

'which' and 'locate' commands are also interesting and can be closer to what you mean (and there are frontends to locate for kde).

Live and let live - use the search engine.
"Use the docs Luke, use the docs!"

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UltraKnorrie

Beginner

Posts: 2

Location: Belgium

Occupation: Academic

Saturday, February 26th 2005, 1:03am

RE: apropos /kapropos command

Hello wysota,

Thank you for the answer, But I question something in your answer: You say that apropos does not tell what software is installed, But I do not agree with this. I tought that the result (output) of a apropos command is based on a database apropos has searched through and this database is created using the makewhatis command that actually scans the man pages residing on your system. A normal installation routine installs the program together with the manpages, so normally you will not have a manpage on your system without your program. (it could be that the database is not uptodate in which case you should run makewhatis once more or that a program has no manpage (but this is seldom the case for tty-based programs). So apropos refers to every command which has a manpage the synopsis of it mentions the keyword one is looking for. This problem of keywords does hold of course for every query ....

locate-based stuff will only show those programs to me that have a name the keyword is contained within ...

So, a script scanning the output of a rpm -qi `rpm -qa *` command (if it's a rpm package of course) will come most close to it I guess .....

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wysota

Trainee

Posts: 65

Location: Warsaw, POLAND

Saturday, February 26th 2005, 1:20am

RE: apropos /kapropos command

Quoted

Originally posted by UltraKnorrie
A normal installation routine installs the program together with the manpages, so normally you will not have a manpage on your system without your program.

But you can have a program without a manpage, thus you won't get an entry for it (that's why I said it gives you reference about stuff and not the stuff itself). Moreover, I don't think you'll find such programs as printf, scanf, etc. and apropos will report such entries

So I can agree that some of apropos entries report some software installed.

Oh... I just thought of something... you can have a manpage without a program too, if you install the docs alone without the binaries

I think "which" is much better for reporting software available

Live and let live - use the search engine.
"Use the docs Luke, use the docs!"

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