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.TH MAKEWHATIS 8 "September 19, 2005"
.SH NAME
makewhatis \- Create the whatis database
.SH SYNOPSIS
.BI "makewhatis [-u] [-v] [-w] [-s " sections " ] [-c [" catpath "]] [" manpath "]"
.SH DESCRIPTION
.B makewhatis
reads all the manual pages contained in the given
.IR sections " of " manpath 
or the preformatted pages contained in the given
.IR 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.
.LP
Since other languages use a different term for the NAME section,
.B makewhatis
recognizes the equivalent terms in Czech, Italian, Finnish, French,
German and Spanish.
.LP
If no
.I manpath
argument is given,
.I /usr/man
is assumed by default.
.SH OPTIONS
.TP
.B -u
Update database with new pages.
.TP
.B -v
Verbose output
.TP
.B -w
Use manpath obtained from `man --path`
.TP 
.BI -s " sections"
Looks in the
.I sections
of
.IR 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.
.TP 
.BI -c " catpath"
The preformatted manual pages located in
.I catpath
are scanned. If the argument is not provided, it is assumed to be the
first existing directory between
.IR /usr/man/preformat " and " /usr/man .
.SH EXAMPLES
.PP
To rebuild only 
.IR /usr/X11R6/man/whatis " and " /usr/local/man/whatis
.IP 
makewhatis /usr/X11R6/man /usr/local/man
.PP
To rebuild all the databases, including those of the Finnish, French
and Italian translations
.IP
LANGUAGE=fi:fr:it makewhatis -w
.SH BUGS
.B makewhatis
may not handle too well manual pages written with non-standard troff
macros, such as the Tcl/Tk pages.
.PP
.B makewhatis
does not work on preformatted translations.
.SH AUTHOR
John W. Eaton was the original author of 
.BR "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.
.SH SEE ALSO
.BR apropos (1),
.BR man (1),
.BR whatis (1)