April 3, 2005 MAKEWHATIS 8

### NAME

makewhatis - create a whatis.db database

### SYNOPSIS

/usr/libexec/makewhatis [-fw] [-C file] [manpath ...]

### DESCRIPTION

makewhatis strips the NAME lines from compiled or raw man(1) pages and creates a whatis.db database for use in apropos(1), whatis(1), or with man(1)'s -k option. Man pages compressed with compress(1) and gzip(1) are uncompressed before processing.

When manpath is provided multiple times, the resulting database file is generated in the first directory specified, and contains entries for all the directories.

If manpath is not provided, makewhatis parses ```/etc/man.conf` and regenerates the whatis database files specified there. Each database file is assumed to reside in the root of the appropriate man page hierarchy.

The options are as follows:

-C file
  Use file (in man.conf(5) format) as configuration file instead of the default, ```/etc/man.conf`.

-f
  Don't spawn child processes to generate the individual database files, but do all the work synchronously in the foreground.

-w
  Print warnings about input files we don't like.

### FILES

```whatis.db`
  name of the whatis database
```/etc/man.conf`
  man(1) configuration file, used to get the location of the whatis databases when makewhatis is called without arguments

### SEE ALSO

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

### HISTORY

makewhatis first appeared in NetBSD1.0, as a shell script written by J.T. Conklin <jtc@NetBSD.org> and Thorsten Frueauf <frueauf@ira.uka.de>. Further work was done by Matthew Green, Luke Mewburn, and Chris Demetriou.

Matthias Scheler has reimplemented makewhatis in C in NetBSD1.5.

### AUTHORS

Matthias Scheler <tron@NetBSD.org>