01-31-2014
OK. I found out why apropos does not work for the PHP manpages.
apropos is dependent on parsing the formatted manpages to create the whatis database for each manpage set, as discussed in
mandb
Where we see:
Quote:
DIAGNOSTICS
The following warning messages can be emitted during database building.
<filename>: whatis parse for page(sec) failed
An attempt to extract whatis line(s) from the given <filename>
failed. This is usually due to a poorly written manual page,
but if many such messages are emitted it is likely that the sys-
tem contains non-standard manual pages which are incompatible
with the man-db whatis parser. See the WHATIS PARSING section
in lexgrog(1) for more information.
So, I used
lexgrog on the PHP manpages and got the parse error; and when I examined the PHP manpages files, it's easy to see the pages are very poorly formatted (compared to "standard" manpages for linux and osx) and would require a lot of reformatting to get the parser to work so
whatis would work, etc.
Hahaha... if anyone cares to reformat over 10,000 PHP pages so the
lexgrog parser works on the PHP manpages, please raise your hand... otherwise, well will accept the fact that the PHP manpages will not be including in our recursive apropos (whatis) search.
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LEARN ABOUT NETBSD
catman
CATMAN(8) BSD System Manager's Manual CATMAN(8)
NAME
catman -- format cat pages from man pages
SYNOPSIS
catman [-knpsw] [-m directory] [sections]
catman [-knpsw] [-M directory] [sections]
DESCRIPTION
catman creates formatted versions of the on-line manual pages from their nroff(1) source. Manual pages whose formatted versions are missing
or out of date are regenerated. If manual pages are regenerated, catman also regenerates the whatis database.
The optional sections argument is one word, and contains the section numbers of all the sections to be checked. For example, if sections is
``13f8'', the manual pages in sections 1, 3f, and 8 will be checked and regenerated. If no sections argument is provided, catman will try to
operate on all of the known manual sections.
The options are as follows:
-k Ignore errors from nroff when building manpages.
-n Do not create the whatis database.
-p Display the commands that would have been executed, but do not actually execute them.
-s Perform work silently; do not echo commands as they are executed. This flag is ignored if -p is specified.
-w Only create the whatis database.
-m directory
Add directory to the set of directories to be updated.
-M directory
Update manual pages in directory.
SEE ALSO
apropos(1), man(1), whatis(1)
BUGS
Currently does not handle hard links.
BSD
July 30, 1993 BSD