WHEREIS(1)                  General Commands Manual                 WHEREIS(1)

NAME
     whereis – locate programs

SYNOPSIS
     whereis [-abmqu] [-BM dir ... -f] program ...

DESCRIPTION
     The whereis utility checks the standard binary, and manual page
     directories for the specified programs, printing out the paths of any it
     finds.  The supplied program names are first stripped of leading path
     name components and any single trailing extension added by gzip(1),
     compress(1), or bzip2(1).

     The default path searched is the string returned by the sysctl(8) utility
     for the “user.cs_path” string, with /usr/libexec and the current user's
     $PATH appended.  Manual pages are searched by default along the $MANPATH.

     The following options are available:

     -B      Specify directories to search for binaries.  Requires the -f
             option.

     -M      Specify directories to search for manual pages.  Requires the -f
             option.

     -a      Report all matches instead of only the first of each requested
             type.

     -b      Search for binaries.

     -f      Delimits the list of directories after the -B, -M, or -S options,
             and indicates the beginning of the program list.

     -m      Search for manual pages.

     -q      (“quiet”).  Suppress the output of the utility name in front of
             the normal output line.  This can become handy for use in a
             backquote substitution of a shell command line, see EXAMPLES.

     -u      Search for “unusual” entries.  A file is said to be unusual if it
             does not have at least one entry of each requested type.  Only
             the name of the unusual entry is printed.

EXAMPLES
     The following finds all utilities under /usr/bin that do not have
     documentation:

           whereis -m -u /usr/bin/*

SEE ALSO
     find(1), locate(1), man(1), which(1), sysctl(8)

HISTORY
     The whereis utility appeared in 3.0BSD.  This version re-implements the
     historical functionality that was lost in 4.4BSD.

AUTHORS
     This implementation of the whereis command was written by Jörg Wunsch.

BUGS
     This re-implementation of the whereis utility is not bug-for-bug
     compatible with historical versions.  It is believed to be compatible
     with the version that was shipping with FreeBSD 2.2 through FreeBSD 4.5
     though.

macOS 15.2                      August 22, 2002                     macOS 15.2