Re: Discovering alternative commands

[Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org>]

On Thu, Jun 01, 2017 at 07:22:36AM -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:
> I'm working on a problem that requires as input an association of disk
> partitions and their "label" (in gparted sense).
> 
> I already have blkid and lsblk. They are obviously designed for different
> purposes. They both _can_ supply the desired information. Neither is ideal
> for me.
> 
> Two questions (one asking for fish, the other asking to be taught to fish):
> 1. what other commands should I look at?

Trivially, ls -al on /dev/disks/by* can show you a bunch of
things. You are probably already aware of the contents of
/proc/partitions and /proc/mounts, but I'll mention them anyway.




> 2. is there some reference that groups commands/programs by similarity?

Not as such, but...

apropos partition
  will tell you about installed commands which have a man page
  prominently mentioning the word "partition".

  In this case you would also want to run apropos against
  "label" and "block".

  running "man -k" is almost the same; apropos takes more
  options.


-dsr-