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MAKEWHATIS(8)							 MAKEWHATIS(8)

NAME
       makewhatis - Create the whatis database

SYNOPSIS
       makewhatis [-u] [-v] [-w] [-s sections ] [-c [catpath]] [manpath]

DESCRIPTION
       makewhatis  reads  all the manual pages contained in the given sections
       of manpath or the preformatted pages contained in the given sections of
       catpath.	  For each page, it writes a line in the whatis database; each
       line consists of the name of the page and a  short  description,	 sepa‐
       rated  by a dash. The description is extracted using the content of the
       NAME section of the manual page.

       Since other languages use a different term for the NAME section,	 make‐
       whatis  recognizes  the	equivalent  terms  in Czech, Italian, Finnish,
       French, German and Spanish.

       If no manpath argument is given, /usr/man is assumed by default.

OPTIONS
       -u     Update database with new pages (file's status was	 last  changed
	      24 hours ago)

       -v     Verbose output

       -w     Use manpath obtained from `man --path`

       -s sections
	      Looks  in	 the sections of manpath or catpath.  If the option is
	      absent, its value is assumed to be ´1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 n l´

       -c catpath
	      The preformatted manual pages located in catpath are scanned. If
	      the  argument  is	 not  provided,	 it is assumed to be the first
	      existing directory between /usr/man/preformat and /usr/man.

EXAMPLES
       To rebuild only /usr/X11R6/man/whatis and /usr/local/man/whatis

	      makewhatis /usr/X11R6/man /usr/local/man

       To rebuild all the databases, including those of	 the  Finnish,	French
       and Italian translations

	      LANGUAGE=fi:fr:it makewhatis -w

BUGS
       makewhatis  may not handle too well manual pages written with non-stan‐
       dard troff macros, such as the Tcl/Tk pages.

       makewhatis does not work on preformatted translations.

AUTHOR
       John W. Eaton was the  original	author	of  man.   Zeyd	 M.  Ben-Halim
       released	 man  1.2,  and	 Andries Brouwer followed up with versions 1.3
       thru 1.5p.  Federico  Lucifredi	<flucifredi@acm.org>  is  the  current
       maintainer.

SEE ALSO
       apropos(1), man(1), whatis(1)

			      September 19, 2005		 MAKEWHATIS(8)

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