makewhatis(1)

NAME

makewhatis - create whatis database

SYNOPSIS

makewhatis [-a] [-i column] [-n name] [-o file] [-v] [-L]
           [directories ...]

DESCRIPTION

The makewhatis utility collects the names and short descrip
tions from all
the unformatted man pages in the directories and puts them
into a file
used by the whatis(1) and apropos(1) commands. Directories
may be separated by colons instead of spaces. If no directories are
specified, the
contents of the MANPATH environment variable will be used,
or if that is
not set, the default directory /usr/share/man will be pro
cessed.
The options are as follows:
-a Appends to the output file(s) instead of
replacing them.
The output will be sorted with duplicate
lines removed,
but may have obsolete entries.
-i column Indents the description by column charac
ters. The
default value is 24.
-n name Uses name instead of whatis.
-o file Outputs all lines to the file instead of
*/man/whatis.
-v Makes makewhatis more verbose about what it
is doing.
-L Process only localized subdirectories cor
responding to
the locale specified in the standard envi
ronment variables.

ENVIRONMENT

LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LANG
These variables control what subdirectories
will be processed if the -L option is used.
MACHINE If set, its value is used to override the cur
rent machine
type when searching machine specific subdirec
tories.
MANPATH Determines the set of directories to be pro
cessed if none
are given on the command line.

FILES

/usr/share/man Default directory to process if the MAN
PATH environ
ment variable is not set.
*/man/whatis The default output file.

EXIT STATUS SEE ALSO

apropos(1), whatis(1)

HISTORY

The makewhatis command appeared in FreeBSD 2.1.

AUTHORS

The makewhatis program was originally written in Perl and
was contributed
by Wolfram Schneider. The current version of makewhatis was
rewritten in
C by John Rochester.
BSD May 12, 2002
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