MAKEWHATIS(1) |
FreeBSD General Commands Manual |
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 descriptions 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 processed.
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 characters. 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 corresponding to the locale specified in the standard environment 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 current machine type when searching machine specific subdirectories.
-
MACHINE_ARCH
-
If set, its value is used to override the current architecture when searching architecture specific subdirectories.
-
MANPATH
-
Determines the set of directories to be processed if none are given on the command line.
FILES
-
/usr/share/man
-
Default directory to process if the
MANPATH environment variable is not set.
-
*/man/whatis
-
The default output file.
EXIT STATUS
The
makewhatis utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.
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.