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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | EXAMPLE | FILE SEARCH PATHS | ENVIRONMENT | AVAILABILITY | COLOPHON |
WHEREIS(1) User Commands WHEREIS(1)
whereis - locate the binary, source, and manual page files for a com‐
mand
whereis [options] [-BMS directory... -f] name...
whereis locates the binary, source and manual files for the specified
command names. The supplied names are first stripped of leading
pathname 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
specified by $PATH and $MANPATH.
The search restrictions (options -b, -m and -s) are cumulative and
apply to the subsequent name patterns on the command line. Any new
search restriction resets the search mask. For example,
whereis -bm ls tr -m gcc
searches for "ls" and "tr" binaries and man pages, and for "gcc" man
pages only.
The options -B, -M and -S reset search paths for the subsequent name
patterns. For example,
whereis -m ls -M /usr/share/man/man1 -f cal
searches for "ls" man pages in all default paths, but for "cal" in
the /usr/share/man/man1 directory only.
-b Search for binaries.
-m Search for manuals.
-s Search 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 and
documentation in Info format, 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 the list of effective lookup paths that whereis is
using. When none of -B, -M, or -S is specified, the option
will output the hard-coded paths that the command was able to
find on the system.
-h, --help
Display help text and exit.
-V, --version
Display version information and exit.
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 *
By default whereis tries to find files from hard-coded paths, which
are defined with glob patterns. The command attempts to use the
contents of $PATH and $MANPATH environment variables as default
search path. The easiest way to know what paths are in use is to add
the -l listing option. Effects of the -B, -M, and -S are displayed
with -l.
WHEREIS_DEBUG=all
enables debug output.
The whereis command is part of the util-linux package and is
available from Linux Kernel Archive
⟨https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/⟩.
This page is part of the util-linux (a random collection of Linux
utilities) project. Information about the project can be found at
⟨https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/⟩. If you have a
bug report for this manual page, send it to
util-linux@vger.kernel.org. This page was obtained from the
project's upstream Git repository
⟨git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git⟩ on
2017-07-05. If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML ver‐
sion of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up-to-date
source for the page, or you have corrections or improvements to the
information in this COLOPHON (which is not part of the original man‐
ual page), send a mail to man-pages@man7.org
util-linux October 2014 WHEREIS(1)