4.2.1.2. Finding a manpage
The -k argument of man is used to produce a list of all of the pages that contain a specific keyword in their short descriptions. For example, if you wanted to see all of the manpages that contained the word calendar in their summary:
$ man -k calendar
Date::Calc (3pm) - Gregorian calendar date calculations
Date::Calendar (3pm) - Calendar objects for different holiday schemes
Date::Calendar::Profiles (3pm) - Some sample profiles for Date::Calendar and
Date::Calendar::Year
Date::Calendar::Year (3pm) - Implements embedded year objects for Date::Calendar
cal (1) - displays a calendar
Note that the section number is in parentheses. If you were looking for a calendar command, you could ignore the results from section 3 of the manual (library functions), which leaves just one possibility: the cal command. You could then get more information about that command to see if it will do what you need :
$ man cal
apropos is another name for man -k. To my ear, it has more class!
To see all of the manpages with a specific name in all sections of the manual, use the whatis command:
$ whatis uname
uname (1) - print system information
uname (2) - get name and information about current kernel
In this case, you can see that there is a page for uname in section 1 and 2 of the manual.