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Manual Reference Pages  - MAKEWHATIS (8)

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makewhatis - Create the whatis database

CONTENTS

Synopsis
Description
Options
Examples
Bugs
See Also

makewhatis [-u] [-v] [-w] [-s sections ] [-c [catpath]] [-o whatisdb ] [manpath]

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.

-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.
-o whatisdb
	Location of the whatis database. If the option is absent, it is assumed to be /var/cache/man/whatis.

To rebuild the database for only those pages contained in the /usr/X11R6/man and /usr/local/share/man file hierarchies

	makewhatis /usr/X11R6/man /usr/local/share/man
To rebuild all the databases, including those of the Finnish, French and Italian translations
	LANGUAGE=fi:fr:it makewhatis -w

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.

apropos(1), man(1), whatis(1)

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