WHEREIS(1) BSD General Commands Manual WHEREIS(1)NAMEwhereis — locate programs
SYNOPSISwhereis [-abmqsux] [-BMS dir ... -f] program ...
DESCRIPTION
The whereis utility checks the standard binary, manual page, and source
directories for the specified programs, printing out the paths of any it
finds. The supplied program names are first stripped of leading path
name components, any single trailing extension added by gzip(1),
compress(1), or bzip2(1), and the leading ‘s.’ or trailing ‘,v’ from a
source code control system.
The default path searched is the string returned by the sysctl(8) utility
for the “user.cs_path” string, with /usr/libexec, /usr/games and the cur‐
rent user's $PATH appended. Manual pages are searched by default along
the $MANPATH. Program sources are located in a list of known standard
places, including all the subdirectories of /usr/src and /usr/ports.
The following options are available:
-B Specify directories to search for binaries. Requires the -f
option.
-M Specify directories to search for manual pages. Requires the -f
option.
-S Specify directories to search for program sources. Requires the
-f option.
-a Report all matches instead of only the first of each requested
type.
-b Search for binaries.
-f Delimits the list of directories after the -B, -M, or -S options,
and indicates the beginning of the program list.
-m Search for manual pages.
-q (“quiet”). Suppress the output of the utility name in front of
the normal output line. This can become handy for use in a back‐
quote substitution of a shell command line, see EXAMPLES.
-s Search for source directories.
-u Search for “unusual” entries. A file is said to be unusual if it
does not have at least one entry of each requested type. Only
the name of the unusual entry is printed.
-x Do not use “expensive” tools when searching for source directo‐
ries. Normally, after unsuccessfully searching all the first-
level subdirectories of the source directory list, whereis will
ask locate(1) to find the entry on its behalf. Since this can
take much longer, it can be turned off with -x.
EXAMPLES
The following finds all utilities under /usr/bin that do not have docu‐
mentation:
whereis-m -u /usr/bin/*
Change to the source code directory of ls(1):
cd `whereis -sq ls`
SEE ALSOfind(1), locate(1), man(1), which(1), sysctl(8)HISTORY
The whereis utility appeared in 3.0BSD. This version re-implements the
historical functionality that was lost in 4.4BSD.
AUTHORS
This implementation of the whereis command was written by Jörg Wunsch.
BUGS
This re-implementation of the whereis utility is not bug-for-bug compati‐
ble with historical versions. It is believed to be compatible with the
version that was shipping with FreeBSD 2.2 through FreeBSD 4.5 though.
The whereis utility can report some unrelated source entries when the -a
option is specified.
BSD August 22, 2002 BSD
