makewhatis(8) - NetBSD Manual Pages

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MAKEWHATIS(8)           NetBSD System Manager's Manual           MAKEWHATIS(8)


NAME

     makewhatis - create a whatis.db database


SYNOPSIS

     /usr/libexec/makewhatis [-C file] [-f] [manpath ...]


DESCRIPTION

     makewhatis strips the NAME lines from compiled or raw man(1) pages and
     creates a whatis.db database for use in apropos(1), whatis(1) or with
     man(1)'s -k option.  Man pages compressed with compress(1) and gzip(1)
     are uncompressed before processing.

     When manpath is provided multiple times, the resulting database file is
     generated in the first directory specified, and contains entries for all
     the directories.

     If manpath is not provided, makewhatis parses /etc/man.conf and regener-
     ates the whatis database files specified there.  Each database file is
     assumed to reside in the root of the appropriate man page hierarchy.

     The options are as follows:

     -C file
           Use file (in man.conf(5) format) as configuration file instead of
           the default, /etc/man.conf.

     -f    Don't spawn child processes to generate the individual database
           files, but do all the work synchronously in the foreground.


FILES

     whatis.db       name of the whatis database
     /etc/man.conf   man(1) configuration file, used to get the location of
                     the whatis databases when makewhatis is called without
                     arguments


SEE ALSO

     apropos(1), man(1), whatis(1), man.conf(5)


HISTORY

     makewhatis first appeared in NetBSD 1.0, as a shell script written by
     J.T. Conklin <jtc@netbsd.org> and Thorsten Frueauf <frueauf@ira.uka.de>.
     Further work was done by Matthew Green, Luke Mewburn and Chris Demetriou.

     Matthias Scheler has reimplemented makewhatis in C in NetBSD 1.5.


AUTHORS

     Matthias Scheler <tron@netbsd.org>

NetBSD 1.6.2                     March 8, 2002                               1