The
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 separated 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
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.
MACHINE_ARCH
If set, its value is used to override the current
architecture when searching architecture 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.
An -nosplit
The
program was originally written in Perl and was contributed by
An Wolfram Schneider .
The current version of
was rewritten in C by
An John Rochester .
