Re: where is what? - clarification (hopefully)

[Keith Harbaugh <harbaugh@math.georgetown.edu>]

Thanks to all who have replied.

Actually what motivated my question was the advocacy of the procmailer
Jari Aalto: please see his http://www.procmail.org/jari/pm-tips.html
(`pm' here and below is for `procmail'),
in particular, its
1.1 for its examples of the `@(#)' identifier (in addition to the normative
    RCS `$...$'), and
1.5 for its explicit advocacy of the `what' program, *in-addition-to*
    the RCS `ident' program

To provide a self-contained reference for what we are talking about,
here are excerpts from the text version `pm-tips.txt' of the html page,
first for 1.1:
    .@(#) $Id: pm-tips.txt,v 1.74 1999/04/23 14:45:05 jaalto Exp $
    .$Keywords: procmail sendmail formail mail UBE UCE spam filter $
    .$URL: http://www.procmail.org/jari/ $
    .$Contactid: <jari.aalto@poboxes.com> $
    .$FileServer: send mail to Contactid with subject "send help" $
    .$UrlLinksLastChecked: 1999-04-30 $
    .@(#) This is a procmail tips page: a collection of procmail recipes,
    .@(#) instructions, howtos. The document also contains URL pointers to
    .@(#) the procmail mailing list and sites that fight against Internet
    .@(#) UBE. You will also find many other interesting subjects that
    .@(#) discuss about internet email: headers, mime and RFCs. There is

then for 1.5:
    Please also familiarise yourself to unix what(1) and GNU RCS
    ident(1), if you have those commands in your system. It is
    important that you mark interesting text to these tools so that
    someone can get an overview of your supplied files
        % what  FILES       - Print @( # ) tags
        % ident FILES       - Print $ $ keywords

Further, if one retrieves his file pm-code.zip, one finds nearly 50
source files commented using these conventions.

Given this extensive use of `unix what(1)', and wondering how much else code
is out there documented in a similar fashion,
I think it is a reasonable question to ask what is the `open source status'
of a tool to take advantage of those documentation conventions.

As to whatis, whatis is to "display manual page descriptions" according to
its man page, thus something from what Jari is requiring.
As to grep, I suppose grep can do something reasonable in this regard,
but in consideration of how long grep has been around, I suspect `what'
must have had some added value to make it worth having an independent
existence.

Clearly this isn't the most critical lacuna for debian, or for anyone else,
but I thought it might be worth bringing up. Thank you for your time.

Keith