GCATMAN(8)                    Manual pager utils                    GCATMAN(8)

NAME
       gcatman - create or update the pre-formatted manual pages

SYNOPSIS
       gcatman [-d?V] [-M path] [-C file] [section] ...

DESCRIPTION
       gcatman is used to create an up to date set of pre-formatted manual
       pages known as cat pages.  Cat pages are generally much faster to
       display than the original manual pages, but require extra storage
       space.  The decision to support cat pages is that of the local
       administrator, who must provide suitable directories to contain them.

       The options available to gcatman are the manual page hierarchies and
       sections to pre-format.  The default hierarchies are those specified as
       system hierarchies in the man-db configuration file, and the default
       sections are either the colon-delimited contents of the environment
       variable $MANSECT or the standard set compiled into gman if $MANSECT is
       undefined.  Supplying gcatman with a set of whitespace-delimited
       section names will override both of the above.

       gcatman makes use of the index database cache associated with each
       hierarchy to determine which files need to be formatted.

OPTIONS
       -d, --debug
              Print debugging information.

       -M path, --manpath=path
              Specify an alternate colon-delimited manual page hierarchy
              search path.  By default, this is all paths indicated as system
              hierarchies in the man-db configuration file.

       -C file, --config-file=file
              Use this user configuration file rather than the default of
              ~/.manpath.

       -?, --help
              Print a help message and exit.

       --usage
              Print a short usage message and exit.

       -V, --version
              Display version information.

ENVIRONMENT
       MANSECT
              If $MANSECT is set, its value is a colon-delimited list of
              sections and it is used to determine which manual sections to
              search and in what order.  The default is "1 n l 8 3 0 2 3type 5
              4 9 6 7", unless overridden by the SECTION directive in
              /opt/homebrew/etc/man_db.conf.

       MANPATH
              If $MANPATH is set, its value is interpreted as the colon-
              delimited manual page hierarchy search path to use.

              See the SEARCH PATH section of manpath(5) for the default
              behaviour and details of how this environment variable is
              handled.

FILES
       /opt/homebrew/etc/man_db.conf
              man-db configuration file.

       /usr/man/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)
              A traditional global index database cache.

       /var/catman/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)
              An alternate or FSSTND compliant global index database cache.

SEE ALSO
       gman(1), manpath(5), gmandb(8)

AUTHOR
       Wilf. (G.Wilford@ee.surrey.ac.uk).
       Fabrizio Polacco (fpolacco@debian.org).
       Colin Watson (cjwatson@debian.org).

BUGS
       https://gitlab.com/man-db/man-db/-/issues
       https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?group=man-db

2.13.0                            2024-08-29                        GCATMAN(8)