1 .\" Man page for catman
3 .\" Copyright (C), 1994, 1995, Graeme W. Wilford. (Wilf.)
5 .\" You may distribute under the terms of the GNU General Public
6 .\" License as specified in the file COPYING that comes with the
7 .\" man-db distribution.
9 .\" Sat Dec 10 14:17:29 GMT 1994 Wilf. (G.Wilford@ee.surrey.ac.uk)
12 .TH %thcatman% 8 "%date%" "%version%" "Manual pager utils"
14 %catman% \- create or update the pre-formatted manual pages
26 is used to create an up to date set of pre-formatted manual pages known as
28 Cat pages are generally much faster to display than the original
29 manual pages, but require extra storage space.
30 The decision to support cat pages is that of the local administrator, who
31 must provide suitable directories to contain them.
33 The options available to
35 are the manual page hierarchies and sections to pre-format.
36 The default hierarchies are those specified as system hierarchies in the
37 man-db configuration file, and the default sections are either the
38 colon-delimited contents of the environment variable
40 or the standard set compiled into
47 with a set of whitespace-delimited section names will override both of
53 database cache associated with each hierarchy to determine which files
57 .if !'po4a'hide' .BR \-d ", " \-\-debug
58 Print debugging information.
60 .BI \-M\ path \fR,\ \fB\-\-manpath= path
61 Specify an alternate colon-delimited manual page hierarchy search path.
62 By default, this is all paths indicated as system hierarchies
63 in the man-db configuration file.
65 .BI \-C\ file \fR,\ \fB\-\-config\-file= file
66 Use this user configuration file rather than the default of
69 .if !'po4a'hide' .BR \-? ", " \-\-help
70 Print a help message and exit.
72 .if !'po4a'hide' .B \-\-usage
73 Print a short usage message and exit.
75 .if !'po4a'hide' .BR \-V ", " \-\-version
76 Display version information.
79 .if !'po4a'hide' .B MANSECT
82 is set, its value is a colon-delimited list of sections and it is used to
83 determine which manual sections to search and in what order.
84 The default is "%sections%", unless overridden by the
87 .IR %manpath_config_file% .
89 .if !'po4a'hide' .B MANPATH
92 is set, its value is interpreted as the colon-delimited manual page
93 hierarchy search path to use.
99 for the default behaviour and details of how this environment variable is
103 .if !'po4a'hide' .I %manpath_config_file%
104 man-db configuration file.
106 .if !'po4a'hide' .I /usr/man/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)
111 .if !'po4a'hide' .I /var/catman/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)
112 An alternate or FSSTND
117 .if !'po4a'hide' .BR %man% (1),
118 .if !'po4a'hide' .BR manpath (5),
119 .if !'po4a'hide' .BR %mandb% (8)
122 .if !'po4a'hide' Wilf.\& (G.Wilford@ee.surrey.ac.uk).
123 .if !'po4a'hide' Fabrizio Polacco (fpolacco@debian.org).
124 .if !'po4a'hide' Colin Watson (cjwatson@debian.org).
127 .if !'po4a'hide' https://gitlab.com/cjwatson/man-db/-/issues
129 .if !'po4a'hide' https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?group=man-db