Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csmil.umich.edu!holtz
From: holtz@csmil.umich.edu (Brian Holtz)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: man(1) lookup: how does it work?
Message-ID: <1104@mailrus.cc.umich.edu>
Date: 27 May 89 21:07:48 GMT
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Reply-To: holtz@csmil.umich.edu (Brian Holtz)
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Organization: Cognitive Science and Machine Intelligence Laboratory
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How does man(1) know which man page to read when the topic is
not the name of the man page's file?  For instance,
"man hashstat" reads the csh_builtins man page automagically.
Now, "hashstat" is in the whatis database file as one topic among
many on a line that starts with "csh_builtins"; a cursory glance
through the whatis file seems to show that to be a trend -- the
first topic on multi-topic lines is often the same name as the
man file for that set of topics.  Is this just a coincidence?