MAKEWHATIS(1) BSD General Commands Manual MAKEWHATIS(1)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 sepa‐
rated 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.
MACHINE_ARCH
If set, its value is used to override the current architecture
when searching architecture 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.
EXIT STATUS
The makewhatis utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.
SEE ALSOapropos(1), whatis(1)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 December 3, 2005 BSD
