catman(1M)

DESCRIPTION

The catman command creates the formatted versions of the online manpages from nroff-compatible source files. Each manpage in the man*.Z and man* directories is examined, and those whose formatted versions are missing or out-of-date are recreated. catman formats the most recent of the entries, compresses it, and puts it into the appropriate cat*.Z directory.

If any changes are made, catman recreates the /usr/share/lib/whatis database. By default, the /usr/share/lib/whatis database is overwritten. If the MANPATH environment variable is set to a nondefault set of paths, the old database file is saved in /usr/share/lib/whatis.old so that, if desired, the system administrator may merge them together.

By default, catman searches the man*.Z and man* subdirectories under the following directories:

If MANPATH is set in the environment, the directories given in MANPATH are checked instead of the default. See environ(5) for a description of the MANPATH environment variable.

Before running catman, remove any existing cat* directories. If the -z option is used, cat*.Z directories should be removed instead. If both cat*.Z and cat* directories exist, man(1) updates both directories and more space is used.

Any command-line parameters not starting with - are interpreted as a list of manpage sections (directories) to search. For example:

restricts updating to manpage sections 1, 2, and 3 (directories man1, man2, and man3).

EXTERNAL INFLUENCES

WARNINGS

If unformatted manpages (those in the ../man* subdirectories) have been removed since the last time catman was run, information in the /usr/share/lib/whatis database may be lost. The -m option may be used to override this, but may result in repeated lines in the database for the same manpage.

EXAMPLES

Create uncompressed cat* files for sections 1 and 1m of the manual, but don't create the /usr/share/lib/whatis database:

Run catman from a server to create cat* entries for a diskless client under the alternate root /export/shared_roots/OS_700:

This will create cat* manpages under:

and a whatis file in:

Create cat* entries for an application and merge the information with the /usr/share/lib/whatis database:

Note that you may wish to save MANPATH before doing this, so as not to lose your current MANPATH.

AUTHOR

catman was developed by HP and the University of California, Berkeley.

FILES

SEE ALSO

compress(1), fixman(1M), man(1), environ(5).