MAKEWHATIS(1)		  BSD General Commands Manual		 MAKEWHATIS(1)

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 sepa‐
     rated 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.

     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.
     */man/whatis    The default output file.

EXIT STATUS
     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			       December 3, 2005 			   BSD