MAKEWHATIS
Section: Maintenance Commands (8)
Updated: 22 January 1999
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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 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.
SEE ALSO
apropos(1),
man(1),
whatis(1)
Index
- NAME
-
- SYNOPSIS
-
- DESCRIPTION
-
- OPTIONS
-
- EXAMPLES
-
- BUGS
-
- SEE ALSO
-
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