apropos regex start with? I'm trying to use `apropos` so that I would look for all man pages starting with `system`. I try: apropos ^system apropos "^system" but these seem to return lines that don't start with system, but where system occurs somewhere in the line. Any ideas? **Edit** As per comment below, the above actually works but it matches against several compoments: \- cmd name \- cmd description \- cmd one liner. So when I searched for system, I got a line like this: tapset::task_time (3stap) - systemtap task_time tapset Which makes sense because the description starts with system. One way to get really just the lines starting with "system" would be: apropos "" | grep "^system"

Running `apropos '^system'` works for me, returning the list of man pages where either the page name itself starts with system or the one line description starts with system.

For example, the output on Debian (jessie) includes:


system-config-printer (1) - configure a CUPS server
sigset (3) - System V signal API


I know of no clean way to tell `apropros` to search only in page names _or_ in the one-line description, but there's always `grep`:


apropos system | grep -- '^system' # page names
apropos system | grep -- '- system' # descriptions


Either of these can be encapsulated in a shell function such as this:


apro() { apropos "$1" | grep -- "^$1"; }