redhat man page for makewhatis

Query: makewhatis

OS: redhat

Section: 8

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

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, its value is assumed to be '1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 n l' -c catpath The preformatted manual pages located in catpath are scanned. If the argument is not provided, it is assumed to be the first exist- ing 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.
SEE ALSO
apropos(1), man(1), whatis(1) 22 January 1999 MAKEWHATIS(8)