[Bug 927028] Re: 'apropos' maxes out CPU when run with '/bin/*' as argument

[Colin Watson]

Something like 'apropos /bin/bash' doesn't do anything useful anyway.
The 'whatis' program sounds closer to what you want, but needs to be
invoked as 'whatis bash' rather than 'whatis /bin/bash'.

So, it sounds like I have two bugs here:

 1) apropos reopens and rescans the database for every command-line argument, which is inefficient;
 2) whatis doesn't do the right thing when given the full path to an executable as an argument (compare the change to man in man-db 2.5.7 that made this work for that program).

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Title:
  'apropos' maxes out CPU when run with '/bin/*' as argument

Status in “man-db” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  When 'apropos' is executed with an argument containing a list of files
  in a directory (e.g., '/bin/*'), it maxes out the CPU for a good long
  while (~40 seconds for /bin/*, about 9.5 minutes for /usr/bin/[a-z]*).

  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  ben at feynman:~$ apropos ~/bin/* & sleep 2; top -b -p $! -d 1 -n 3
  [2] 9671

    PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                             
   9671 ben       20   0  7080 2224  928 R   100  0.2   0:02.46 apropos                                             

  
    PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                             
   9671 ben       20   0  7012 2160  928 R   101  0.2   0:03.45 apropos                                             

  
    PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                             
   9671 ben       20   0  7012 2164  928 R   100  0.2   0:04.44 apropos                                             
  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  ben at feynman:~$ dpkg -S /usr/bin/apropos
  man-db: /usr/bin/apropos

  ben at feynman:~$ lsb_release -rd
  Description:    Ubuntu 11.10
  Release:        11.10

  ben at feynman:~$ apt-cache policy man-db
  man-db:
    Installed: 2.6.0.2-2
    Candidate: 2.6.0.2-2
    Version table:
   *** 2.6.0.2-2 0
          500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric/main i386 Packages
          100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

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