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.
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.
DIAGNOSTICS
The makewhatis utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.
SEE ALSO
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 BSD