Indexing your man pages
Its not as boring as you think, but you’ll HAVE to do it when you don’t have a windex file and want to search using man -k :
anton@opensolaris:/$ man -k grub
/usr/share/man/windex: No such file or directory
To get round this, we simply go ahead and create the index with catman:
anton@opensolaris:/$ pfexec time catman -w
real 2.9
user 1.8
sys 0.1
Its pretty quick, and you get left with a little index in /usr/share/man/windex. Its just an ascii version of all the names of your manpages, plus a one line summary of what each one does:
1 1 (3openssl) - OpenSSL configuration functions
1 1 (3openssl) - OpenSSL configuration functions
1394 ieee1394 (7d) - Solaris IEEE-1394 Architecture
2 2 (3openssl) - \& OpenSSL configuration cleanup functions
2 2 (3openssl) - \& OpenSSL configuration cleanup functions
2 2 (3openssl) - \& OpenSSL configuration cleanup functions
2.1 EasyTAG (1) - Tag editor for MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files
2_F32_Sat mlib_SignalConvertShift_U8_S8_Sat (3mlib) – data type convert
with shifting
5.0 MySQL (1) - MySQL RDBMS version 5.0 for Solaris
6to4 tun (7m) - tunneling STREAMS module
6to4relay 6to4relay (1m) - administer configuration for 6to4 relay router
communication
6to4tun tun (7m) - tunneling STREAMS module
7-Zip 7-Zip (1) - A file archiver with highest compression ratio
So now when you do your man -k , you’ll get something useful!:
anton@opensolaris:/$ man -k grub
bootadm bootadm (1m) - manage bootability of GRUB-enabled operating system
grub grub (5) - GRand Unified Bootloader software on Solaris
installgrub installgrub (1m) – install GRUB in a disk partition or a floppy
Crucially you only want to do catman -w , otherwise you’ll be reformatting all your manpages!
From the man page of catman:
-w Only create the windex database that is
used by whatis(1) and the man(1) -f and
-k options. No manual reformatting is
done.
