plucky (8) makewhatis.8.gz

NAME

     makewhatis — index UNIX manuals

SYNOPSIS

     makewhatis [-aDnpQ] [-T utf8] [-C file]
     makewhatis [-aDnpQ] [-T utf8] dir ...
     makewhatis [-DnpQ] [-T utf8] -d dir [file ...]
     makewhatis [-Dnp] [-T utf8] -u dir [file ...]
     makewhatis [-DQ] -t file ...

DESCRIPTION

     The makewhatis utility extracts keywords from UNIX manuals and indexes them in a database for fast
     retrieval by apropos(1), whatis(1), and man(1)'s -k option.

     By default, makewhatis creates a database in each dir using the files mansection/[arch/]title.section and
     catsection/[arch/]title.0 in that directory.  Existing databases are replaced.  If a directory contains no
     manual pages, no database is created in that directory.  If dir is not provided, makewhatis uses the
     default paths stipulated by man.conf(5).

     The arguments are as follows:

     -a       Use all directories and files found below dir ....

     -C file  Specify an alternative configuration file in man.conf(5) format.

     -D       Display all files added or removed to the index.  With a second -D, also show all keywords added
              for each file.

     -d dir   Merge (remove and re-add) file ... to the database in dir.

     -n       Do not create or modify any database; scan and parse only, and print manual page names and
              descriptions to standard output.

     -p       Print warnings about potential problems with manual pages to the standard error output.

     -Q       Quickly build reduced-size databases by reading only the NAME sections of manuals.  The resulting
              databases will usually contain names and descriptions only.

     -T utf8  Use UTF-8 encoding instead of ASCII for strings stored in the databases.

     -t file ...
              Check the given files for potential problems.  Implies -a, -n, and -p.  All diagnostic messages
              are printed to the standard output; the standard error output is not used.

     -u dir   Remove file ... from the database in dir.  If that causes the database to become empty, also
              delete the database file.

     If fatal parse errors are encountered while parsing, the offending file is printed to stderr, omitted from
     the index, and the parse continues with the next input file.

ENVIRONMENT

     MANPATH  A colon-separated list of directories to create databases in.  Ignored if a dir argument or the -t
              option is specified.

FILES

     mandoc.db
             A database of manpages relative to the directory of the file.  This file is portable across
             architectures and systems, so long as the manpage hierarchy it indexes does not change.

     /etc/man.conf
             The default man(1) configuration file.

EXIT STATUS

     The makewhatis utility exits with one of the following values:

     0       No errors occurred.
     5       Invalid command line arguments were specified.  No input files have been read.
     6       An operating system error occurred, for example memory exhaustion or an error accessing input
             files.  Such errors cause makewhatis to exit at once, possibly in the middle of parsing or
             formatting a file.  The output databases are corrupt and should be removed.

SEE ALSO

     apropos(1), man(1), whatis(1), man.conf(5)

HISTORY

     A makewhatis utility first appeared in 2BSD.  It was rewritten in perl(1) for OpenBSD 2.7 and in C for
     OpenBSD 5.6.

     The dir argument first appeared in NetBSD 1.0; the options -dpt in OpenBSD 2.7; the option -u in
     OpenBSD 3.4; and the options -aCDnQT in OpenBSD 5.6.

AUTHORS

     Bill Joy wrote the original BSD makewhatis in February 1979, Marc Espie started the Perl version in 2000,
     and the current version of makewhatis was written by Kristaps Dzonsons <kristaps@bsd.lv> and Ingo Schwarze
     <schwarze@openbsd.org>.