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WHEREIS(1)                                          User Commands                                          WHEREIS(1)



NAME
       whereis - locate the binary, source, and manual page files for a command

SYNOPSIS
       whereis [options] [-BMS directory... -f] name...

DESCRIPTION
       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  exam‐
       ple: .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.

OPTIONS
       -b     Search only for binaries.

       -m     Search only for manuals.

       -s     Search only 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 directo‐
              ries.

       -M list
              Limit  the places where whereis searches for manuals, by a whitespace-separated list of directo‐
              ries.

       -S list
              Limit the places where whereis searches for sources, by a whitespace-separated list of  directo‐
              ries.

       -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 list of effective lookup paths the whereis is using.  When non of -B, -M, or -S is speci‐
              fied the option will out hard coded paths that the command was able to find on system.

EXAMPLE
       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 *

FILE SEARCH PATHS
       By default whereis tries to find files from hard-coded paths, which are defined with glob patterns. The
       command attempst to use contents of $PATH and $MANPATH environment variables as  default  search  path.
       The  easiest way to know what paths are in use is to add -l listing option.  Effects of the -B, -M, and
       -S are display with -l.

AVAILABILITY
       The whereis command is part of the util-linux package  and  is  available  from  Linux  Kernel  Archive
       ⟨ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/⟩.