6.16. Installing Man

6.16.1. Installation of Man

Before Man is installed, the man patch file needs to be unpacked.


patch -Np1 -i ../man-1.5i2.patch &&
./configure -default &&
make &&
make install

You may want to take a look at the man hint which deals with formatting and compression issues for man pages.

6.16.2. Contents

The Man package contains the man, apropos whatis and makewhatis programs.

6.16.3. Description

6.16.3.1. man

man formats and displays the on-line manual pages.

6.16.3.2. apropos

apropos searches a set of database files containing short descriptions of system commands for keywords and displays the result on the standard output.

6.16.3.3. whatis

whatis searches a set of database files containing short descriptions of system commands for keywords and displays the result on the standard output. Only complete word matches are displayed.

6.16.3.4. makewhatis

makewhatis reads all the manual pages contained in given sections of manpath or the pre-formatted pages contained in the given sections of catpath. For each page, it writes a line in the whatis database; each line consists of the name of the page and a short description, separated by a dash. The description is extracted using the content of the NAME section of the manual page.