Linux utility to know command for a particular task

Question

Hi all,
In my initial days of using linux I usually had to search google to know the command for doing a particular task. Once I have the command name, i can view its usage using man command-name.
Similarly I was thinking of some utility which can tell the command to do a particular task if the task to be done is specified as an argument and opens the man page for that command e.g:

findUtilty "find all files in a directory"
output:
ls
find

I want to know if some utility of that kind exists, if so it will be very handy especially for newbies. If not then i may like to implement it.

thanx,

Answer 1

Parsing natural language is hard because there are thousands of ways to rephrase one sentence. Google does it best as far as I know. So, there is no such tool. There are handy and practical manuals that makes it easy to find the right tool for the job. Also, there is a huge community behind core-utils (and linux in general), so try both forums and IRC. Often, the latter is the fastest. And people tend to parse natural language as expected :)

Answer 2

Not as nice as you are asking about, but

apropos <keyword>

and

man -k <keyword>

can be very useful.

Answer 3

apropos will do something like you suggest.

Answer 4

I guess it is: List of Unix utilities @ Wikipedia

Answer 5

on Debian (and presumably derived systems) this is also useful:

sudo apt-cache search <keyword>