• 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, separated 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, makewhatis 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 (file's status was last changed 24 hours ago)

  -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-standard 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)

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