MAKEWHATIS(8)		     System Manager's Manual		   MAKEWHATIS(8)

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  cat-
     path.   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.

     -v	    Verbose output

     -w	    Use manpath obtained from `man --path`

     -s sections
	    Looks in the sections of manpath or catpath.  If the option	 is  ab-
	    sent,  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 di-
	    rectory 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.  Fed-
     erico Lucifredi <flucifredi@acm.org> is the current maintainer.

SEE ALSO
     apropos(1), man(1), whatis(1)

			       September 19, 2005		   MAKEWHATIS(8)