whatis gets all the information from the whatis database, which is created using the makewhatis .
There are two ways to add an entry to the database.
- Create and install a help page for your program or script, then run
makewhatis . - Manually edit whatis database (not recommended)
makewhatis takes the first line from the NAME section of your teamβs makewhatis page.
The location of the whatis database on my machine /usr/share/man/whatis is how it looks.
ABORT(7) - abort the current transaction ALTER_AGGREGATE(7) - change the definition of an aggregate function ALTER_COLLATION(7) - change the definition of a collation ALTER_CONVERSION(7) - change the definition of a conversion ... ping(8) - send ICMP ECHO_REQUEST packets to network hosts ...
And here is the conclusion of man ping
NAME ping -- send ICMP ECHO_REQUEST packets to network hosts SYNOPSIS ping [-AaCDdfnoQqRrv] [-b boundif] [-c count] [-G sweepmaxsize]
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