NAME¶
catman - create or update the pre-formatted manual pages
SYNOPSIS¶
catman [
-d?V] [
-M path] [
-C file]
[
section] ...
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.
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.
- -?, --help
- Print a help message and exit.
- --usage
- Print a short usage message and exit.
- -V, --version
- Display version information.
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. The default is "1 n l 8 3 2 3posix 3pm 3perl 5 4 9 6 7",
unless overridden by the SECTION directive in
/etc/manpath.config.
- MANPATH
- If $MANPATH is set, its value is interpreted as the colon-delimited
manual page hierarchy search path to use.
FILES¶
- /etc/manpath.config
- man-db configuration file.
- /usr/man/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)
- A traditional global index database cache.
- /var/catman/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)
- An alternate or FSSTND compliant global index database cache.
SEE ALSO¶
man(1),
manpath(5),
mandb(8)
AUTHOR¶
Wilf. (G.Wilford@ee.surrey.ac.uk).
Fabrizio Polacco (fpolacco@debian.org).
Colin Watson (cjwatson@debian.org).