MAKEWHATIS
Section: Maintenance Commands (8)
Updated: September 19, 2005
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NAME
makewhatis - Create the whatis database
SYNOPSIS
makewhatis [-u] [-v] [-w] [-s sections ] [-c [catpath]] [manpath]
DESCRIPTION
makewhatis
reads all the manual pages contained in the given
sections of
manpath
or the preformatted pages contained in the given
sections of
catpath.
For each page, it writes a line in the whatis database; each line
consists of the name of the page and a short description, separated
by a dash. The description is extracted using the content of the
NAME section of the manual page.
Since other languages use a different term for the NAME section,
makewhatis
recognizes the equivalent terms in Czech, Italian, Finnish, French,
German and Spanish.
If no
manpath
argument is given,
/usr/man
is assumed by default.
OPTIONS
- -u
-
Update database with new pages.
- -v
-
Verbose output
- -w
-
Use manpath obtained from `man --path`
- -s sections
-
Looks in the
sections
of
manpath or catpath.
If the option is absent, the MANSECT env var will be used. If it too
is absent, the MANSECT setting in man.conf will be used.
- -c catpath
-
The preformatted manual pages located in
catpath
are scanned. If the argument is not provided, it is assumed to be the
first existing directory between
/usr/man/preformat and /usr/man.
EXAMPLES
To rebuild only
/usr/X11R6/man/whatis and /usr/local/man/whatis
-
makewhatis /usr/X11R6/man /usr/local/man
To rebuild all the databases, including those of the Finnish, French
and Italian translations
-
LANGUAGE=fi:fr:it makewhatis -w
BUGS
makewhatis
may not handle too well manual pages written with non-standard troff
macros, such as the Tcl/Tk pages.
makewhatis
does not work on preformatted translations.
AUTHOR
John W. Eaton was the original author of
man.
Zeyd M. Ben-Halim released man 1.2, and Andries Brouwer followed up with versions 1.3 thru 1.5p.
Federico Lucifredi <
flucifredi@acm.org> is the current maintainer.
SEE ALSO
apropos(1),
man(1),
whatis(1)
Index
- NAME
-
- SYNOPSIS
-
- DESCRIPTION
-
- OPTIONS
-
- EXAMPLES
-
- BUGS
-
- AUTHOR
-
- SEE ALSO
-
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