WHEREIS(1) User Commands WHEREIS(1)
NAME
whereis - locate the binary, source, and manual page files for a com-
mand
SYNOPSIS
whereis [options] [-BMS directory... -f] name...
DESCRIPTION
whereis locates the binary, source and manual files for the specified
command names. The supplied names are first stripped of leading path-
name components and any (single) trailing extension of the form .ext
(for example: .c) Prefixes of s. resulting from use of source code
control are also dealt with. whereis then attempts to locate the
desired program in the standard Linux places, and in the places speci-
fied by $PATH and $MANPATH.
OPTIONS
-b Search only for binaries.
-m Search only for manuals.
-s Search only for sources.
-u Only show the command names that have unusual entries. A
command is said to be unusual if it does not have just
one entry of each explicitly requested type. Thus
'whereis -m -u *' asks for those files in the current
directory which have no documentation file, or more than
one.
-B list
Limit the places where whereis searches for binaries, by
a whitespace-separated list of directories.
-M list
Limit the places where whereis searches for manuals, by a
whitespace-separated list of directories.
-S list
Limit the places where whereis searches for sources, by a
whitespace-separated list of directories.
-f Terminates the directory list and signals the start of
filenames. It must be used when any of the -B, -M, or -S
options is used.
-l Output list of effective lookup paths the whereis is
using. When non of -B, -M, or -S is specified the option
will out hard coded paths that the command was able to
find on system.
EXAMPLE
To find all files in /usr/bin which are not documented in /usr/
man/man1 or have no source in /usr/src:
$ cd /usr/bin
$ whereis -u -ms -M /usr/man/man1 -S /usr/src -f *
FILE SEARCH PATHS
By default whereis tries to find files from hard-coded paths,
which are defined with glob patterns. The command attempst to
use contents of $PATH and $MANPATH environment variables as
default search path. The easiest way to know what paths are in
use is to add -l listing option. Effects of the -B, -M, and -S
are display with -l.
AVAILABILITY
The whereis command is part of the util-linux package and is
available from Linux Kernel Archive <ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub
/linux/utils/util-linux/>.
util-linux March 2013 WHEREIS(1)