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# The Answer Gang

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### Q: avoid getting answers from apropos in the man sections 3 and 3x

From Sándor Bárány

Answered By Mike Orr

> Dear Answer Gang,

> I am looking for a way to avoid getting answers to my apropos queries from the man sections 3 and 3x (ie I want to see only command names and no APIs). How can I do that without statically removing those man sections?

> Regards,

> S aacute;ndor B aacute;r aacute;ny

> [Mike] If you want to see only a certain section, you can pass that as the second argument to "man". For instance, "crontab" has two pages. "man 5 crontab" shows the file format, and "man 1 crontab" (or "man 8 crontab" on some systems) shows the command.

> Apropos doesn't have any options, but man can be called as:

> `
> man -S 1:5:8 MyCommand
> man --sections=1:5:8 MyCommand`

> to make it search only certain sections. In this case, it will display the first file it finds.

> The easiest way to do what you want would be to have a shell script or function that greps the output of "apropos" to remove the unwanted lines:

> `
> #!/bin/sh
> apropos $* | fgrep -v '(3)
> (3X)'`

> Or if you like regular expressions:

> `
> #!/bin/sh
> apropos $* | egrep -v '\((3|3X)\)'`

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Published in issue 71 of Linux Gazette October 2001

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