mkapropos(1) — USER COMMANDS
NAME
mkapropos − create apropos list of manpage descriptions
SYNOPSIS
mkapropos [−w|-m] [file ...] [directory ...]
DESCRIPTION
mkapropos prints a one−line description per manpage on standard output. The output of mkapropos is similar to that of the whatis file found on BSD systems. Typically, the output is redirected to a file that can be searched for keyword strings. The output can be used as the aproposfile resource of xman(1).
mkapropos searches manpage files for the descriptive text. The manpage may be formatted or nroff source. If formatted, the manpage file may be optionally packed or compressed. See compress(1) or pack(1).
The description is the text of the “NAME” section of the manpage. The description section is delimited by the keyword “NAME” at the beginning of the section and by a blank line preceding the next manpage section. mkapropos filters out newlines found in the “NAME” section to produce the one−line format, so that a simple grep(1) search can find all the information associated with a given manpage.
Either manpage filenames or directory names may be given as arguments. If individual filenames are given, only the specified files will be searched. If directory names are given, mkapropos will recursively search those directories.
If no command line arguments are given, mkapropos first checks whether the MANPATH environment variable is set. If so, mkapropos recursively searches for manpages in each directory specified by MANPATH. If not, mkapropos recursively searches for manpages in the directory /usr/catman.
The following options are available:
−w mkapropos prints a one line description similar to the output given by mkapropos without −w option, except that the suffixes of the file are enclosed in parentheses. Hyphenated words due to the line breaks are combined.
−m mkapropos prints lines of mapping associations for commands on one manpage. One line of mapping includes the command name, file name where the command is documented, and the description. The -m option should not be used to generate whatis database files. man(1) only understands the default and -w formats of mkapropos. The -m option is unsupported and will be removed in a later release.