bsd man page for catman

CATMAN(8)						      System Manager's Manual							 CATMAN(8)

NAME
       catman - create the cat files for the manual

SYNOPSIS
       /usr/sbin/catman [ -p ] [ -n ] [ -w ] [ -M path ] [ sections ]

DESCRIPTION
       Catman  creates	the  preformatted versions of the on-line manual from the nroff input files.  Each manual page is examined and those whose
       preformatted versions are missing or out of date are recreated.	If any changes are made, catman will recreate the whatis database.

       If there is one parameter not starting with a `-', it is taken to be a list of manual sections to look in.  For example

	      catman 123

       will cause the updating to only happen to manual sections 1, 2, and 3.

       Options:

       -n     prevents creations of the whatis database.

       -p     prints what would be done instead of doing it.

       -w     causes only the whatis database to be created.  No manual reformatting is done.

       -M     updates manual pages located in the set of directories specified by path (/usr/man by default).  Path has the form of a colon  (`:')
	      separated  list  of directory names, for example `/usr/local/man:/usr/man'.  If the environment variable `MANPATH' is set, its value
	      is used for the default path.

       If the nroff source file contains only a line of the form `.so manx/yyy.x', a symbolic link is made in the catx directory to the  appropri-
       ate  preformatted manual page.  This feature allows easy distribution of the preformatted manual pages among a group of associated machines
       with rdist(1).  The nroff sources need not be distributed to all machines, thus saving the associated disk space.  As an example,  consider
       a  local  network  with	5 machines, called mach1 through mach5.  Suppose mach3 has the manual page nroff sources.  Every night, mach3 runs
       catman via cron(8) and later runs rdist with a distfile that looks like:

	      MANSLAVES = ( mach1 mach2 mach4 mach5 )

	      MANUALS = (/usr/man/cat[1-8no] /usr/man/whatis)

	      ${MANUALS} -> ${MANSLAVES}
		      install -R;
		      notify root;

FILES
       /usr/man 	      default manual directory location
       /usr/man/man?/*.*      raw (nroff input) manual sections
       /usr/man/cat?/*.*      preformatted manual pages
       /usr/man/whatis	      whatis database
       /usr/sbin/makewhatis   command script to make whatis database

SEE ALSO
       man(1), cron(8), rdist(1)

BUGS
       Acts oddly on nights with full moons.

       The need for catman(8) is almost but not quite gone.  Most of the manpages have been moved out of /usr/src/man into the sourcecode  hierar-
       chy.  The recreation of the whatis database is the main use of catman now.

4th Berkeley Distribution					 October 23, 1996							 CATMAN(8)