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MAKEWHATIS

Section: Maintenance Commands (8)
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BSD mandoc

NAME

makewhatis - index UNIX manuals

SYNOPSIS

[-aDnpQ ] [-T utf8 ] [-C file ]
[-aDnpQ ] [-T utf8 ] dir ...
[-DnpQ ] [-T utf8 ] -d dir [file ... ]
[-Dnp ] [-T utf8 ] -u dir [file ... ]
[-DQ ] -t file ...

DESCRIPTION

The utility extracts keywords from UNIX manuals and indexes them in a database for fast retrieval by apropos(1), whatis(1), and man(1)Ns's -k option.

By default, creates a database in each dir using the files man section / [arch / ] title . section and cat section / [arch / ] title . 0 in that directory. Existing databases are replaced. If a directory contains no manual pages, no database is created in that directory. If dir is not provided, uses the default paths stipulated by man.conf5.

The arguments are as follows:

-a: Use all directories and files found below dir ...
-C file: Specify an alternative configuration file in man.conf5 format.
-D: Display all files added or removed to the index. With a second -D also show all keywords added for each file.
-d dir: Merge (remove and r-add) file ... to the database in dir
-n: Do not create or modify any database; scan and parse only, and print manual page names and descriptions to standard output.
-p: Print warnings about potential problems with manual pages to the standard error output.
-Q: Quickly build reduce-size databases by reading only the NAME sections of manuals. The resulting databases will usually contain names and descriptions only.
-T utf8: Use UT-8 encoding instead of ASCII for strings stored in the databases.
-t file ...: Check the given files for potential problems. Implies -a -n and -p All diagnostic messages are printed to the standard output; the standard error output is not used.
-u dir: Remove file ... from the database in dir If that causes the database to become empty, also delete the database file.

If fatal parse errors are encountered while parsing, the offending file is printed to stderr, omitted from the index, and the parse continues with the next input file.

ENVIRONMENT

MANPATH: A colo-separated list of directories to create databases in. Ignored if a dir argument or the -t option is specified.

FILES

mandoc.db: A database of manpages relative to the directory of the file. This file is portable across architectures and systems, so long as the manpage hierarchy it indexes does not change.
/etc/man.conf: The default man(1) configuration file.

EXIT STATUS

The utility exits with one of the following values:

0: No errors occurred.
5: Invalid command line arguments were specified. No input files have been read.
6: An operating system error occurred, for example memory exhaustion or an error accessing input files. Such errors cause to exit at once, possibly in the middle of parsing or formatting a file. The output databases are corrupt and should be removed.

HISTORY

A utility first appeared in BSD 2 It was rewritten in perl(1) for Ox 2.7 and in C for Ox 5.6 .

The dir argument first appeared in Nx 1.0 ; the options -dpt in Ox 2.7 ; the option -u in Ox 3.4 ; and the options -aCDnQT in Ox 5.6 .

AUTHORS

An -nosplit An Bill Joy wrote the original BSD in February 1979, An Marc Espie started the Perl version in 2000, and the current version of was written by An Kristaps Dzonsons Aq Mt kristaps@bsd.lv and An Ingo Schwarze Aq Mt schwarze@openbsd.org .