Is there a Linux command that allows use of wildcards for the whereis command?

user@shell:$ find -name vi*

This may suite your needs, but realize it won't JUST find vi and vim, but ANYTHING that has vi* in it's name. Of course doing this below, will have different results:

user@shell:$ find -name *vi

or

user@shell:$ find -name vi*

Normally, you can pipe the output of one command through grep.

# whereis vi |grep vi

But because whereis will only return one value, it's really poinless, so you can also try the locate command like so:

# locate vi

and maybe filter it so you are only lokking in user/bin or usr/local/bin???

Or better still, maybe use the find command above and look only for strings that are in user/bin or usr/local/bin.

The locate command will do this for you. The command works with a database that is updated regulary.

If you execute

locate vi

it will show you lots of documentation files, config files and executables of vi and vim. So locate uses wildcards.

If the output is too large, grep it or whatever you want.

Here's a link to the man page of locate and a German explanation for locate.

Good luck.

Hello,

You could also try "apropos". It does a grep on the manpage database. In your case that would return any page including the text "vi" which would include "vim".

Good Luck

john@john-laptop ~ $ whereis vi

vi: /usr/bin/vi /usr/share/man/man1/vi.1.gz

john@john-laptop ~ $ whereis vi*

virtualbox-3.1_3.1.8-61349~Ubuntu~karmic_i386 (1):

virtualbox-3.1_3.1.8-61349~Ubuntu~karmic_i386:

john@john-laptop ~ $

Whereis works exactly the way you want it. Wildcards are always available in BASH