freebsd man page for makewhatis

MAKEWHATIS(1)						    BSD General Commands Manual 					     MAKEWHATIS(1)

NAME
     makewhatis -- create whatis database

SYNOPSIS
     makewhatis [-a] [-i column] [-n name] [-o file] [-v] [-L] [directories ...]

DESCRIPTION
     The makewhatis utility collects the names and short descriptions from all the unformatted man pages in the directories and puts them into a
     file used by the whatis(1) and apropos(1) commands.  Directories may be separated by colons instead of spaces.  If no directories are speci-
     fied, the contents of the MANPATH environment variable will be used, or if that is not set, the default directory /usr/share/man will be pro-
     cessed.

     The options are as follows:

     -a 	Appends to the output file(s) instead of replacing them.  The output will be sorted with duplicate lines removed, but may have
		obsolete entries.

     -i column	Indents the description by column characters.  The default value is 24.

     -n name	Uses name instead of whatis.

     -o file	Outputs all lines to the file instead of */man/whatis.

     -v 	Makes makewhatis more verbose about what it is doing.

     -L 	Process only localized subdirectories corresponding to the locale specified in the standard environment variables.

ENVIRONMENT
     LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LANG
	      These variables control what subdirectories will be processed if the -L option is used.

     MACHINE  If set, its value is used to override the current machine type when searching machine specific subdirectories.

     MACHINE_ARCH
	      If set, its value is used to override the current architecture when searching architecture specific subdirectories.

     MANPATH  Determines the set of directories to be processed if none are given on the command line.

FILES
     /usr/share/man  Default directory to process if the MANPATH environment variable is not set.
     */man/whatis    The default output file.

EXIT STATUS
     The makewhatis utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

SEE ALSO
     apropos(1), whatis(1)

HISTORY
     The makewhatis command appeared in FreeBSD 2.1.

AUTHORS
     The makewhatis program was originally written in Perl and was contributed by Wolfram Schneider.  The current version of makewhatis was
     rewritten in C by John Rochester.

BSD
								 December 3, 2005							       BSD