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.

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.