[NTLUG:Discuss] Strings in BASH, an easier way?

[terry]

On Wed, Dec 24, 2008 at 10:13 AM, richard witt <imageek72 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 24, 2008 at 9:36 AM, Robert Citek <robert.citek at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Do they give the same results?
>>
>> $ whatis  -r . | sort | uniq | wc -l
>> 4728
>>
>> $ man -k . | sort | uniq | wc -l
>> 4728
>>
>> $ for i in $(echo $PATH | cut -d: -f1- --output-delimiter=" "); do
>>  for j in $(ls -1 $i) ; do
>>    apropos $j
>>  done
>> done | sort | uniq | wc -l
>> apropos: fatal: regex `[': Invalid regular expression
>> 4688
>
>
>
> rwitt at wslinux-rwitt ~ $ whatis -r .
> whatis: -r: unknown option
>
> rwitt at wslinux-rwitt ~ $ whatis --version
> whatis from man-1.6f
>
> Anyone have a clue why this does not work for me?
>
> ___

I don't know, but same here.
The implementation of whatis on my Slackware 12.1 system does not
recognize the -r or -s switches.

cap at pe-slack:~$ whatis -r
whatis: -r: unknown option
cap at pe-slack:~$ whatis -s
whatis: -s: unknown option
cap at pe-slack:~$ whatis --version
whatis from man-1.6f