CATMAN(8,C)                 AIX Commands Reference                  CATMAN(8,C)



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catman



PURPOSE

Creates the cat files for the manual.

SYNTAX


               +--------+   +-------------+
/etc/catman ---| one of |---| +---------+ |--- sections ---|
               | +----+ |   +-| -p      |-+
               +-| -n |-+    ^| -M path ||
                 | -w |      |+---------+|
                 +----+      +-----------+


Note:  This command does not have MBCS support.

DESCRIPTION

The catman command creates the preformatted versions of the on-line manual from
the nroff input files.  Each manual page is examined and those whose
preformatted versions are missing or out of date are recreated.  If any changes
are made, catman recreates the whatis data base.

Note:  AIX online manuals are delivered preformatted.  The catman command is
       used only for manuals delivered in nroff format.

If there is one parameter not starting with a "-", it is taken to be a list of
manual sections to look in.  For example:

  catman 123

will cause updating only to manual sections 1, 2, and 3.

FLAGS

-n      Prevents creations of the whatis data base.

-p      Prints what would be done instead of doing it.

-w      Causes only the whatis data base to be created.  No manual reformatting
        is done.

-M      Updates manual pages located in the set of directories specified by
        path (/usr/man by default).  path has the form of a colon-separated
        list of directory names, for example:




Processed November 8, 1990        CATMAN(8,C)                                 1

CATMAN(8,C)                 AIX Commands Reference                  CATMAN(8,C)



          /usr/local/man:/usr/man

        If the environment variable MANPATH is set, its value is used for the
        default path.

If the nroff source file contains only a line of the form:

  .so manx/yyy.x

a symbolic link is made in the catx directory to the appropriate preformatted
manual page.  This feature allows easy distribution of the preformatted manual
pages among a group of associated machines with rdist.  The nroff sources need
not be distributed to all machines, thus saving the associated disk space.  As
an example, consider a local network with 5 machines, called mach1 through
mach5.  Suppose mach3 has the manual page nroff sources.  Every night, mach3
runs catman via cron and later runs rdist with a distfile that looks like:

  MANSLAVES = ( mach1 mach2 mach4 mach5 )

  MANUALS = (/usr/man/cat[1-8no] /usr/man/whatis)

  ${MANUALS} -> ${MANSLAVES}
      install -R;
      notify root;

FILES

/usr/man                      Default manual directory location.
/usr/man/man?/*.*             Raw (nroff input) manual sections.
/usr/man/cat?/*.*             Preformatted manual pages.
/usr/man/whatis               whatis data base.
/usr/lib/makewhatis           Command script to make whatis data base.

RELATED INFORMATION

The following commands:  "man" and "cron."



















Processed November 8, 1990        CATMAN(8,C)                                 2