NAME

       catman - create or update the pre-formatted manual pages

SYNOPSIS

       catman [-d?V] [-M path] [-C file] [section] ...

DESCRIPTION

       catman  is  used  to  create  an up to date set of pre-formatted manual pages known as cat
       pages.  Cat pages are generally much faster to display than the original manual pages, but
       require  extra  storage  space.   The  decision  to support cat pages is that of the local
       administrator, who must provide suitable directories to contain them.

       The options available to catman are the manual  page  hierarchies  and  sections  to  pre-
       format.   The  default hierarchies are those specified as system hierarchies in the man-db
       configuration file, and the default sections are either the  colon-delimited  contents  of
       the  environment  variable  $MANSECT  or the standard set compiled into man if $MANSECT is
       undefined.  Supplying catman  with  a  set  of  whitespace-delimited  section  names  will
       override both of the above.

       catman  makes  use of the index database cache associated with each hierarchy to determine
       which files need to be formatted.

OPTIONS

       -d, --debug
              Print debugging information.

       -M path, --manpath=path
              Specify an  alternate  colon-delimited  manual  page  hierarchy  search  path.   By
              default,  this  is  all  paths  indicated  as  system  hierarchies  in  the  man-db
              configuration file.

       -C file, --config-file=file
              Use this user configuration file rather than the default of ~/.manpath.

       -?, --help
              Print a help message and exit.

       --usage
              Print a short usage message and exit.

       -V, --version
              Display version information.

ENVIRONMENT

       MANSECT
              If $MANSECT is set, its value is a colon-delimited list of sections and it is  used
              to  determine which manual sections to search and in what order.  The default is "1
              n l 8 3 2 3posix 3pm 3perl 5 4 9 6 7", unless overridden by the  SECTION  directive
              in /etc/manpath.config.

       MANPATH
              If  $MANPATH  is  set,  its value is interpreted as the colon-delimited manual page
              hierarchy search path to use.

FILES

       /etc/manpath.config
              man-db configuration file.

       /usr/man/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)
              A traditional global index database cache.

       /var/catman/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)
              An alternate or FSSTND compliant global index database cache.

SEE ALSO

       man(1), manpath(5), mandb(8)

AUTHOR

       Wilf. (G.Wilford@ee.surrey.ac.uk).
       Fabrizio Polacco (fpolacco@debian.org).
       Colin Watson (cjwatson@debian.org).