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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.

       -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,  the MANSECT env var will be used.  If it too is absent,
	      the MANSECT setting in man.conf will be used.

       -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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