NAME
makewhatis
- create a whatis.db database
SYNOPSIS
/usr/libexec/makewhatis
[-fw]
[-C file]
[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 regenerates 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.
- -w
-
Print warnings about input files we don't like.
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
NetBSD1.0,
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
NetBSD1.5.
AUTHORS
Matthias Scheler <tron@NetBSD.org>