Apropos could be the most helpful command for a beginner. Almost every command has a manual page that gives description about what it does along with its advanced options. But the man command cannot do much for a beginner who doesn’t know the name of the command he/she wants to know about. This is where apropos comes to the rescue.
Apropos searches the man pages for keywords provided by the user. Its like google for man pages. So you can just type apropos to know more about.
Example
amrita@amrita-desktop:~$ apropos gcc c89-gcc (1) - ANSI (1989) C compiler c99-gcc (1) - ANSI (1999) C compiler gcc (1) - GNU project C and C++ compiler gcc-4.4 (1) - GNU project C and C++ compiler i486-linux-gnu-gcc (1) - GNU project C and C++ compiler i486-linux-gnu-gcc-4.4 (1) - GNU project C and C++ compiler
It is a good practice to read the man page of any new command you learn. So open up your shell and man apropos now itself 🙂
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