MAKEWHATIS(8) FreeBSD System Manager's Manual MAKEWHATIS(8)
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 NetBSD 1.0, as a shell script written by
J.T. Conklin <
[email protected]> and Thorsten Frueauf <
[email protected]>.
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 <
[email protected]>
FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE-p8 April 3, 2005 FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE-p8