WHATIS(5)WHATIS(5)NAMEwhatis - database of online manual pages
SYNOPSIS
/usr/man/*/whatis
/usr/man/whatis
DESCRIPTION
The whatis file in each manual page directory is a database of titles
for manual pages. This database is used by man(1) to map titles to
manual pages names. The database is created by makewhatis(1) from the
NAME sections of the manual pages.
The NAME secions must be simple lines with no troff fluff but one back‐
slash like these two:
whatis \- database of online manual pages
cawf, nroff \- C version of the nroff-like, Amazingly Workable
(text) Formatter
These lines are transformed by makewhatis to these two lines for the
database:
cawf, nroff (1) - C version of the nroff-like, Amazingly Work‐
able (text) Formatter
whatis (5) - database of online manual pages
As you can see they are in section number order, so that man searches
them in section order.
Each entry is just a single line, restricting the NAME section to a
single line too with just one dash, and commas and spaces before the
dash as you see above.
SEE ALSOman(1), whatis(1), makewhatis(1), man(7).
BUGS
It seems to be impossible for many manual page writers to keep the NAME
section simple. They also like to use every font available in their
documents. My simple scripts can't read their NAME sections, my simple
me can't read their texts.
AUTHOR
Kees J. Bot (kjb@cs.vu.nl)
WHATIS(5)
