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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MAN(1) General Commands Manual MAN(1)
NAME
man - print out the manual
SYNOPSIS
man [ - ] [ -a ] [ -M path ] [ section ] title ...
DESCRIPTION
Man is the program which provides on-line access to the UNIX manual. If a section specifier is given, man looks in that section of the
manual for the given title(s). Section is either an Arabic section number (``3'' for example), or one of the words ``local'', ``new,'' or
``old''. (The abbreviations ``l'', ``n'', and ``o'' are also allowed.) If section is omitted, man searches all sections of the manual,
giving preference to commands over library subroutines, and displays the first manual page it finds, if any. If the -a option is supplied,
man displays all applicable manual pages.
Normally man checks in standard locations (/usr/man and /usr/local/man) for manual information. This can be changed by supplying a search
path (a la the Bourne shell) with the -M flag. The search path is a colon (``:'') separated list of directories in which man expects to
find the standard manual subdirectories. This search path can also be set with the environmental variable MANPATH.
Since some manual pages are intended for use only on certain machines, man only searches those directories applicable to the current
machine. Man's determination of the current machine type can be overridden by setting the environmental variable MACHINE.
If the standard output is a teletype, and the - flag is not provided, man uses more(1), or the pager provided by the environmental variable
PAGER, to display the manual page.
The FORTRAN version of section 3 of the manual may be specified by supplying man with the section ``3f''. Also, a specific section of the
local manual may be specified by appending a number to the section, i.e. ``l5'' would indicate section 5 of the local manual.
FILES
/usr/man standard manual area
/usr/man/cat?/* directories containing standard manual pages
/usr/local/man/cat?/* directories containing local manual pages
/usr/src/man directories containing unformatted manual pages
SEE ALSO
apropos(1), more(1), whatis(1), whereis(1)
BUGS
The manual is supposed to be reproducible either on the phototypesetter or on a typewriter, however, on a typewriter, some information is
necessarily lost.
4th Berkeley Distribution April 19, 1988 MAN(1)