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makewhatis(8)             BSD System Manager's Manual            makewhatis(8)


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.

     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.


DIAGNOSTICS

     The makewhatis utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.


SEE ALSO

     apropos(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                              May 12, 2002                              BSD

Mac OS X 10.7 - Generated Mon Sep 5 14:41:24 CDT 2011
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