makewhatis(8)

1MAKEWHATIS(8)               System Manager's Manual              MAKEWHATIS(8)
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NAME

6       makewhatis - Create the whatis database
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SYNOPSIS

9       makewhatis [-u] [-v] [-w] [-s sections ] [-c [catpath]] [manpath]
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DESCRIPTION

12       makewhatis  reads  all the manual pages contained in the given sections
13       of manpath or the preformatted pages contained in the given sections of
14       catpath.   For each page, it writes a line in the whatis database; each
15       line consists of the name of the page and a  short  description,  sepa‐
16       rated  by a dash. The description is extracted using the content of the
17       NAME section of the manual page.
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19       Since other languages use a different term for the NAME section,  make‐
20       whatis  recognizes  the  equivalent  terms  in Czech, Italian, Finnish,
21       French, German and Spanish.
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23       If no manpath argument is given, /usr/man is assumed by default.
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OPTIONS

26       -u     Update database with new pages (file's status was  last  changed
27              24 hours ago)
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29       -v     Verbose output
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31       -w     Use manpath obtained from `man --path`
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33       -s sections
34              Looks  in  the sections of manpath or catpath.  If the option is
35              absent, the MANSECT env var will be used.  If it too is  absent,
36              the MANSECT setting in man.conf will be used.
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38       -c catpath
39              The preformatted manual pages located in catpath are scanned. If
40              the argument is not provided, it is  assumed  to  be  the  first
41              existing directory between /usr/man/preformat and /usr/man.
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EXAMPLES

44       To rebuild only /usr/X11R6/man/whatis and /usr/local/man/whatis
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46              makewhatis /usr/X11R6/man /usr/local/man
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48       To  rebuild  all  the databases, including those of the Finnish, French
49       and Italian translations
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51              LANGUAGE=fi:fr:it makewhatis -w
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BUGS

54       makewhatis may not handle too well manual pages written with  non-stan‐
55       dard troff macros, such as the Tcl/Tk pages.
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57       makewhatis does not work on preformatted translations.
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AUTHOR

60       John  W.  Eaton  was  the  original  author  of man.  Zeyd M. Ben-Halim
61       released man 1.2, and Andries Brouwer followed  up  with  versions  1.3
62       thru  1.5p.   Federico  Lucifredi  <flucifredi@acm.org>  is the current
63       maintainer.
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