I am writing a paper on my project, the goal of which is to write a new implementation of the apropos(1) command. While I realize that apropos was written in the early days of Unix when computing resources were scarce and hence its designers kept it simple. I am looking for a concrete source of information on this to back my point.
Is there any historical document or artifact that describes when and why these commands were introduced into Unix? My Google searches have not returned anything useful so I was wondering whether perhaps those of you who have been involved with Unix since the early days might have some knowledge about it.
Best Answer
According to research by an OpenBSD committer, the
aproposcommand appeared in 2BSD and was written by Bill Joy, like the rest of themanimplementation. There's a theory floating around thataproposstarted out as an alias toman -k, butmanin 2BSD didn't have a-koption, so it was presumably the other way round (ATT Research Unix had noaproposand a different meaning forman -k). So 2BSDapropos.cwould be the earliest implementation ofapropos.