A better usage of apropos for searching the man directory I will ask my question starting from a real example.
From the command line prompt, I want to search for a command line tool that will output information about my smart card.
Side Note: I already know that the command line tool that I am looking for is the system_profiler SPSmartCardsDataType but let's pretend I do not know yet.
Step #1
From the command line prompt I type the following: apropos smart card
Step #2
I receive the following result:
SmartCardServices(7)     - overview of SmartCard support
SmartCardServices-legacy(7) - overview of legacy SmartCard support
com.apple.ifdreader(8)   - SmartCard reader daemon
ctkahp(8)                - SmartCard Agent
ctkbind(8)               - SmartCard pairing tool
ctkd(8)                  - SmartCard daemon/agent
pam_smartcard(8)         - Smartcard PAM module
ssh-keychain(8), ssh-keychain.dylib(8) - smartcard/keychain support library

And of course I can use the SmartCardServices command line tool but this is not what I am looking for.
Question: How can I make a better search for a specific command line tool? I guess a search that will query the command line options too?
In my specific case if I search for the keyword smart card why the output does not show me at least the term system_profiler?
I hope I was clear, if not let me know and I can rephrase my question.  Once again, the above it is just an example, I use SmartCard because this is what I had issue in searching today, but it can be anything else.
apropos just looks in the command description, not the full man page. There are no specific commands to &quot;intelligently&quot; search within all man pages, but in a bind you can always run
cd /usr/share/man
zgrep -i smartcard man*/*

PS: This won't help for system_profiler though because the data types supported aren't listed in the man page at all.