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>.