Incidentally you'll find that, besides giving what I think is probably more like the right answer, 'whatis <long list>' is much quicker. It still has a similar inefficiency where it reopens the database every time, but whatis has a much quicker per-item search than apropos does (it only has to look up a single database key rather than scanning them all) so it doesn't matter so much.
$ bash -c 'cd /bin; time whatis * >/dev/null 2>&1' real 0m0.042s user 0m0.012s sys 0m0.008s -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/927028 Title: 'apropos' maxes out CPU when run with '/bin/*' as argument To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/man-db/+bug/927028/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
