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

NAME
     makewhatis -- create whatis database

SYNOPSIS
     makewhatis [-a] [-i column] [-n name] [-o file] [-v] [-L] [directories ...]

DESCRIPTION
     The makewhatis 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 makewhatis 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.

     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.
     */man/whatis    The default output file.

DIAGNOSTICS
     The makewhatis utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

SEE ALSO
     apropos(1), whatis(1)

HISTORY
     The makewhatis command appeared in FreeBSD 2.1.

AUTHORS
     The makewhatis program was originally written in Perl and was contributed by Wolfram Schneider.  The
     current version of makewhatis was rewritten in C by John Rochester.

BSD                                             May 12, 2002                                             BSD