MAKEWHATIS(8) 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, sepa-
rated 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, make-
whatis 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 (file’s status was last changed
24 hours ago)
-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
existing 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-stan-
dard troff macros, such as the Tcl/Tk pages.
makewhatis does not work on preformatted translations.
AUTHOR
John W. Eaton was the original author of man. Zeyd M. Ben-Halim
released man 1.2, and Andries Brouwer followed up with versions 1.3
thru 1.5p. Federico Lucifredi <flucifredi@acm.org> is the current
maintainer.
SEE ALSO
apropos(1), man(1), whatis(1)
September 19, 2005 MAKEWHATIS(8)
