MAKEWHATIS(8)               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.

macOS 15.2                       May 12, 2002                       macOS 15.2