NAME

       makewhatis — index UNIX manuals

SYNOPSIS

       makewhatis [-aDnpQ] [-T utf8] [-C file]
       makewhatis [-aDnpQ] [-T utf8] dir ...
       makewhatis [-DnpQ] [-T utf8] -d dir [file ...]
       makewhatis [-Dnp] [-T utf8] -u dir [file ...]
       makewhatis [-DQ] -t file ...

DESCRIPTION

       The  makewhatis  utility  extracts  keywords  from  Unix  manuals and indexes them in a database for fast
       retrieval by apropos(1), whatis(1), and man(1)'s -k option.

       By default, makewhatis creates a database in each dir using the files mansection/[arch/]title.section and
       catsection/[arch/]title.0 in that directory.  Existing databases are replaced.  If a  directory  contains
       no  manual  pages, no database is created in that directory.  If dir is not provided, makewhatis uses the
       default paths stipulated by man.conf(5).

       The arguments are as follows:

       -a       Use all directories and files found below dir ....

       -C file  Specify an alternative configuration file in man.conf(5) format.

       -D       Display all files added or removed to the index.  With a second -D, also show all keywords added
                for each file.

       -d dir   Merge (remove and re-add) file ... to the database in dir.

       -n       Do not create or modify any database; scan and parse only,  and  print  manual  page  names  and
                descriptions to standard output.

       -p       Print warnings about potential problems with manual pages to the standard error output.

       -Q       Quickly  build  reduced-size  databases  by  reading  only  the  NAME  sections of manuals.  The
                resulting databases will usually contain names and descriptions only.

       -T utf8  Use UTF-8 encoding instead of ASCII for strings stored in the databases.

       -t file ...
                Check the given files for potential problems.  Implies -a, -n, and -p.  All diagnostic  messages
                are printed to the standard output; the standard error output is not used.

       -u dir   Remove  file ...  from  the  database in dir.  If that causes the database to become empty, also
                delete the database file.

       If fatal parse errors are encountered while parsing, the offending file is  printed  to  stderr,  omitted
       from the index, and the parse continues with the next input file.

ENVIRONMENT

       MANPATH  A  colon-separated list of directories to create databases in.  Ignored if a dir argument or the
                -t option is specified.

FILES

       mandoc.db
               A database of manpages relative to the directory of the  file.   This  file  is  portable  across
               architectures and systems, so long as the manpage hierarchy it indexes does not change.

       /etc/man.conf
               The default man(1) configuration file.

EXIT STATUS

       The makewhatis utility exits with one of the following values:

       0       No errors occurred.
       5       Invalid command line arguments were specified.  No input files have been read.
       6       An  operating  system  error  occurred, for example memory exhaustion or an error accessing input
               files.  Such errors cause makewhatis to exit at once,  possibly  in  the  middle  of  parsing  or
               formatting a file.  The output databases are corrupt and should be removed.

SEE ALSO

       apropos(1), man(1), whatis(1), man.conf(5)

HISTORY

       A  makewhatis  utility  first appeared in 2BSD.  It was rewritten in perl(1) for OpenBSD 2.7 and in C for
       OpenBSD 5.6.

       The dir argument first appeared in NetBSD 1.0; the  options  -dpt  in  OpenBSD  2.7;  the  option  -u  in
       OpenBSD 3.4; and the options -aCDnQT in OpenBSD 5.6.

AUTHORS

       Bill Joy wrote the original BSD makewhatis in February 1979, Marc Espie started the Perl version in 2000,
       and  the  current  version  of  makewhatis  was  written  by Kristaps Dzonsons <kristaps@bsd.lv> and Ingo
       Schwarze <schwarze@openbsd.org>.

Debian                                            May 17, 2017                                     MAKEWHATIS(8)