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

[Leroy Tennison]

terry wrote:
> 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
> 
> _______________________________________________
> http://www.ntlug.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
> 
Unfortunately, since you are only one dot version behind the current 
distribution, it sounds like Slackware has fallen behind on the 
revisions to it's utilities.  Don't know what motivated you to select 
that distribution but it may be time to consider alternatives.  I had to 
do this with CentOS due to bugs in the ATA software with the 5.x version 
(at least so far, haven't tried 5.2 and don't intend to after the grief 
I went through).  I'm now on SuSE 10.3.

Suggest you consider one of the "big three": Red Hat variants, SuSE (are 
there variants?) or Debian.  If Slackware comes from one of these 
families then that would be the logical choice.