1. NAME▲

catman - create or update the pre-formatted manual pages

2. SYNOPSIS ▲

catman [  -dhV  ] [  -M path  ] [  -C file  ] [  section  ] . . .

3. DESCRIPTION ▲

catman is used to create an up to date set of pre-formatted manual pages known as cat pages. Cat pages are generally much faster to display than the original manual pages, but require extra storage space. The decision to support cat pages is that of the local administrator, who must provide suitable directories to contain them. The options available to

catman are the manual page hierarchies and sections to pre-format. The default hierarchies are those specified as system hierarchies in the man-db configuration file, and the default sections are either the colon-delimited contents of the environment variable $ MANSECT or the standard set compiled into

man if $ MANSECT is undefined. Supplying

catman with a set of whitespace-delimited section names will override both of the above.

catman makes use of the

index database cache associated with each hierarchy to determine which files need to be formatted.

4. OPTIONS ▲

-d, --debug

    Print debugging information.

  • -M  path , --manpath= path
        Specify an alternate colon-delimited manual page hierarchy search path. By default, this is all paths indicated as system hierarchies in the man-db configuration file.
  • -C  file , --config-file= file
        Use this user configuration file rather than the default of ~/.manpath .

-h, --help

    Print a help message and exit.

-V, --version

    Display version information.

5. ENVIRONMENT ▲

MANSECT

    If $ MANSECT is set, its value is a colon-delimited list of sections and it is used to determine which manual sections to search and in what order.

MANPATH

    If $ MANPATH is set, its value is interpreted as the colon-delimited manual page hierarchy search path to use.

6. FILES ▲

  • /etc/manpath.config
        man-db configuration file.
  • /usr/man/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)
        A traditional global indexdatabase cache.
  • /var/catman/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)
        An alternate or FSSTND compliant global indexdatabase cache.

7. SEE ALSO ▲

R man (1),

R manpath (5),

R mandb (8).

8. AUTHOR ▲

 
Sélectionnez
Wilf. (G.Wilford@ee.surrey.ac.uk).
Fabrizio Polacco (fpolacco@debian.org).
Colin Watson (cjwatson@debian.org).