what does "what" command do

[Atakan Ucar]

Hi all,
Can anybody tell what does 'what' command do?
I must find an alternative to following command for OVOU running on Solaris.

what /opt/OV/bin/OpC/opc.bin

Thanks in advance
Atakan

[Pete Randall · Accepted solution]

"what" just prints the identification string that was compiled into the c program. Why do you need to find an alternative?


Pete

[Vladimir Fabecic]

what - Displays identifying information for Source Code Control System
(SCCS) files

[spex]

Hello Atakan,

From what(1):

The what command searches the given files for all occurrences of the
pattern that get(1) substitutes for %Z% (currently @(#) at this
printing) and prints out what follows until the first ", >, new-line,
\, or null character. For example, if the C program in file f.c
contains
char ident[] = "@(#)identification information";

and f.c is compiled to yield f.o and a.out, the command

what f.c f.o a.out

prints

f.c: identification information

f.o: identification information

a.out: identification information

what is intended to be used in conjunction with the SCCS get command
(see get(1)) which automatically inserts identifying information, but
it can also be used where the information is inserted manually.

PCS