WHATIS(5)

NAME
whatis - database of online manual pages

SYNOPSIS
/usr/man/*/whatis
/usr/man/whatis

DESCRIPTION
The whatis file in each manual page directory is a database of titles for manual pages. This database is used by man(1) to map titles to manual pages names. The database is created by makewhatis(1) from the NAME sections of the manual pages.

The NAME secions must be simple lines with no troff fluff but one backslash like these two:

    whatis \- database of online manual pages
    cawf, nroff \- C version of the nroff-like, Amazingly Workable (text) Formatter

These lines are transformed by makewhatis to these two lines for the database:

    cawf, nroff (1) - C version of the nroff-like, Amazingly Workable (text) Formatter
    whatis (5) - database of online manual pages

As you can see they are in section number order, so that man searches them in section order.

Each entry is just a single line, restricting the NAME section to a single line too with just one dash, and commas and spaces before the dash as you see above.

SEE ALSO
man(1), whatis(1), makewhatis(1), man(7).

BUGS
It seems to be impossible for many manual page writers to keep the NAME section simple. They also like to use every font available in their documents. My simple scripts can't read their NAME sections, my simple me can't read their texts.

AUTHOR
Kees J. Bot (kjb@cs.vu.nl)