'apropos uuid' doesn't find blkid [rant]

[Amedee Van Gasse]

Hi list,

I just formatted one of my partitions to a different filesystem.
As we all know, formatting changes the UUID so I also have to change 
/etc/fstab accordingly. I forgot what the command was to list UUIDs and 
I was already in bash, so I thought, let's use the power of the man pages.
I typed 'apropos uuid' and I got this output:

amedee at fangorn:~$ apropos uuid
Data::UUID (3pm)     - OSSP uuid Backward Compatibility Perl Binding
dbus-uuidgen (1)     - Utility to generate UUIDs
findfs (8)           - Find a filesystem by label or UUID
OSSP::uuid (3pm)     - OSSP uuid Perl Binding
UUID (3pm)           - Perl extension for using UUID interfaces as 
defined in e2fsprogs.
uuidd (8)            - UUID generation daemon
uuidgen (1)          - command-line utility to create a new UUID value

Sorry peeps, but that doesn't help me.

I had to turn on that memory hog also known as Firefox and used this 
query: http://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+find+uuid+of+a+partition
The first result was from the Ubuntu Forums and it gave me exactly the 
answer that I wanted to know: blkid.

amedee at fangorn:~$ blkid
/dev/sda1: UUID="cbca999c-ac35-400b-981e-f6521bdce034" TYPE="ext2"
/dev/sda2: UUID="af28U3-nqkc-r7yc-ImXS-Xrgc-jvuk-cBQWiP" TYPE="LVM2_member"
/dev/mapper/lvmvolume-root: UUID="f3eedbc4-fbb0-4ba8-ac36-38d94b2d3aad" 
TYPE="ext4"
/dev/mapper/lvmvolume-home: UUID="3ca8d92c-c04a-433a-825d-57edc77f014f" 
TYPE="ext4"
/dev/mapper/lvmvolume-swap: UUID="0b92ab6a-7dfe-40b6-b227-833c9f136204" 
TYPE="swap"
/dev/mapper/lvmvolume-vm: LABEL="vm" 
UUID="4779f948-0621-43df-a17d-741d0b44a1a4" TYPE="xfs"
/dev/sdg1: SEC_TYPE="msdos" LABEL="EXT2FSD" UUID="E891-8431" TYPE="vfat"
/dev/sdg2: LABEL="external" UUID="d195e97b-7f5d-41f6-9f55-7761ec569f8a" 
SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3"
/dev/sdh1: UUID="B804-0E83" TYPE="vfat"
/dev/sda3: UUID="00352C6E44CEFA42" TYPE="ntfs"

So *why* [expletive omitted] doesn't `apropos uuid` find the [adjective 
deleted] blkid command??? It really is a command that is relevant! Just 
look:

amedee at fangorn:~$ man blkid | grep uuid
        blkid -L label | -U uuid
        -U  uuid
               Look up one device that uses the uuid. For more details 
see the -L option.

It looks like apropos only searches in the synopsis of commands, and *of 
course* the string "uuid" isn't in the synopsis of blkid:

amedee at fangorn:~$ whatis blkid
blkid (8)            - command-line utility to locate/print block device 
attributes

WHY??? Aaaaaaaaaargggg!!!

Sorry, I just had to vent this. Steam pressure has decreased below 
critical levels.

-- 
Amedee Van Gasse