CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxcommand
sud03r
sud03r

Reputation: 19769

Linux utility to know command for a particular task

In my initial days of using linux I usually had to search google to know the command for doing a particular task. Once I have the command name, i can view its usage using man command-name.
Similarly I was thinking of some utility which can tell the command to do a particular task if the task to be done is specified as an argument and opens the man page for that command e.g:


findUtilty "find all files in a directory"
output:
ls
find

I want to know if some utility of that kind exists, if so it will be very handy especially for newbies. If not then i may like to implement it.

thanx,

Upvotes: 3

Views: 551

Answers (6)

Abhinav Upadhyay
Abhinav Upadhyay

Reputation: 2585

Few years ago NetBSD decided to rewrite its apropos. The new implementation does a full text search with results ranked in order of relevance. It comes close to what you have asked. See the output here

https://man-k.org/search?q=find+all+files+in+directory

Upvotes: 0

TREE
TREE

Reputation: 1302

on Debian (and presumably derived systems) this is also useful: 

sudo apt-cache search <keyword>

Upvotes: 2

dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten
dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten

Reputation: 101241

Not as nice as you are asking about, but

apropos <keyword>

and

man -k <keyword>

can be very useful.

Upvotes: 10

Vanya
Vanya

Reputation: 3319

I guess it is: List of Unix utilities @ Wikipedia

Upvotes: 2

Ken Keenan
Ken Keenan

Reputation: 10558

apropos will do something like you suggest.

Upvotes: 5

Tam&#225;s Szelei
Tam&#225;s Szelei

Reputation: 23961

Parsing natural language is hard because there are thousands of ways to rephrase one sentence. Google does it best as far as I know. So, there is no such tool. There are handy and practical manuals that makes it easy to find the right tool for the job. Also, there is a huge community behind core-utils (and linux in general), so try both forums and IRC. Often, the latter is the fastest. And people tend to parse natural language as expected :)

Upvotes: 6

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