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.
HISTORY
makewhatis first appeared in
NetBSD 1.0, as a shell script written by
J.T. Conklin <jtc@NetBSD.org> and
Thorsten Frueauf <frueauf@ira.uka.de>. Further work was done by
Matthew Green,
Luke Mewburn, and
Chris Demetriou.
Matthias Scheler has reimplemented makewhatis in C in NetBSD 1.5.