MAKEWHATIS(8)MAKEWHATIS(8)NAMEmakewhatis - Create the whatis database
SYNOPSISmakewhatis [-u] [-v] [-w] [-s sections ] [-c [catpath]] [manpath]
DESCRIPTIONmakewhatis 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.
-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, the MANSECT env var will be used. If it too is absent,
the MANSECT setting in man.conf will be used.
-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
BUGSmakewhatis 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 ALSOapropos(1), man(1), whatis(1)
September 19, 2005 MAKEWHATIS(8)