NAME
whatis - database of online manual pages
SYNOPSIS
/usr/man/*/whatis
/usr/man/whatis
DESCRIPTION
The whatis file in each manual page directory is a database
of titles for manual pages. This database is used by man(1)
to map titles to manual pages names. The database is
created by makewhatis(1) from the NAME sections of the
manual pages.
The NAME secions must be simple lines with no troff fluff
but one backslash like these two:
whatis \- database of online manual pages
cawf, nroff \- C version of the nroff-like, Amazingly
Workable (text) Formatter
These lines are transformed by makewhatis to these two lines
for the database:
cawf, nroff (1) - C version of the nroff-like, Amaz-
ingly Workable (text) Formatter
whatis (5) - database of online manual pages
As you can see they are in section number order, so that man
searches them in section order.
Each entry is just a single line, restricting the NAME sec-
tion to a single line too with just one dash, and commas and
spaces before the dash as you see above.
SEE ALSO
man(1), whatis(1), makewhatis(1), man(7).
BUGS
It seems to be impossible for many manual page writers to
keep the NAME section simple. They also like to use every
font available in their documents. My simple scripts can't
read their NAME sections, my simple me can't read their
texts.
AUTHOR
Kees J. Bot (kjb@cs.vu.nl)