man (-k option)

[Howard Hart]

In article <7343 at pyr.gatech.EDU> dvu%pyr at gatech.edu (Dinh Vu) writes:
>The man command with the option k (man -k) does not work on my SunOS 3.5.
>
>[[ "man -k" uses the file "/usr/man/whatis".  This is built with the
>"catman" command (see "catman(8)").  Is this your problem?  --wnl ]]

Since catman takes up an additional 8 MB which we don't have to spare, I
took the shortcut and ran /usr/lib/makewhatis in the /usr/man directory.
I end up with some additional garbage for my man -k output but it still
seems to work OK. I also noticed a Pyramid computer running BSD4.3 UNIX
with an entry for /usr/lib/makewhatis in its crontab. I'm not sure why
you'd want to update the whatis database periodically but maybe that's
what removes the additional garbage I keep seeing. 

[[ Whoops.  Sorry...catman does more than just make the whatis database.
However, "catman -w" will just make "whatis".  Of course it does this by
just running the script "makewhatis", so the results are the same.  I'm
disappointed that Sun took out the BUGS section of the catman manual page.
Maybe they thought it would confuse those without a sense of humor.  It
used to say "Acts oddly on nights with full moons."  --wnl ]]