Tip - using whatis

I recently came across the Linux 'whatis' command. whatis just displays the short description part of a man page. For example:


$whatis dig
dig (1) - DNS lookup utility


A standard Linux distribution comes with hundreds of commands and utilities in the /usr/bin/ directory. Want to know what they all do? You can use whatis in a loop with ls to do the trick.


for f in `ls /usr/bin`; do whatis $f; done | more