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 (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-standard 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.
