makewhatis(8) [redhat man page]
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)
Check Out this Related Man Page
MAKEWHATIS(8) BSD System Manager's Manual MAKEWHATIS(8) 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. 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. DIAGNOSTICS
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
May 12, 2002 BSD