From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0) Description of problem: apropos almost always returns "nothing appropriate". The whatis command has similar problems. The current code in apropos from man1.5j is broken, and the RedHat apropos script has an erroneous 'a' option to the aproposgetopt2 variable (aproposgetopts1 is fine) which isn't in the original code nor is added by any of the patches in the latest source rpm man-1.5j-2. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. /usr/bin/apropos gzip 2. /usr/bin/apropos clock Actual Results: 1. gzip: nothing appropriate 2. oclock (1x) - round X clock xclock (1x) - analog / digital clock for X Expected Results: 1. gunzip [gzip] (1) - compress or expand files gzip (1) - compress or expand files zcat [gzip] (1) - compress or expand files zforce (1) - force a '.gz' extension on all gzip files 2. adjtimex (2) - tune kernel clock alarm (2) - set an alarm clock for delivery of a signal clock (3) - Determine processor time clockdiff (8) - Measures clock difference between us and <destination> with 1msec resolution. Without -o option it uses icmp timestamps, with -o it uses icmp echo with timestamp IP option clock (n) - Obtain and manipulate time hwclock (8) - query and set the hardware clock (RTC) oclock (1x) - round X clock rclock (ouR CLOCK) [rclock] (1) - clock and appointment reminder for X11 xclock (1x) - analog / digital clock for X Additional info: I've made a patch to fix apropos and update it so it behaves like whatis when called with that basename. The patch installs whatis as a link to apropos. I've submitted a similar patch to Andries Brouwer who maintains man, this patch adds fixes for the RedHat specific 'a' option to grep and searches for whatis only under /var/cache/man. The patch obsoletes the files man-1.5j-nonascii.patch and man-1.5i2- legacy.patch from the source rpm.
Created attachment 47040 [details] patch to apropos and Makefile.in for man package
Fixed in 1.5j-3