DESCRIPTION
The
makemandb utility traverses the directories containing man pages, parses the manual pages with the help of libmandoc and builds an Sqlite database
man.db to support full text searches. It obtains the list of directories to traverse using the
-path and
-p options of
man(1).
It supports the following options:
-
-C path
-
Use different man(1) configuration file than the default, /etc/man.conf.
-
-f
-
Force rebuilding the index from scratch, pruning the existing one.
-
-l
-
Limit the parsing to only the NAME section of the pages. This option can be used to mimic the behavior of the classic apropos(1) and also to substantially save disk space.
-
-o
-
Use this option to optimize the index for speed and also to significantly reduce disk space usage. This is a somewhat expensive operation.
-
-q
-
Print only error messages and no status updates.
-
-v
-
Enable verbose output. This prints the name of every file being parsed.
As the database file is stored under /var/db, root privileges are required to run makemandb.
DATABASE SCHEMA
The name of the FTS table is mandb and its schema is as follows:
section |
The section number of the page |
name |
The name of the page from the NAME section. |
name_desc |
The one line description from the NAME section. |
desc |
The DESCRIPTION section. |
lib |
The LIBRARY section. |
return_vals |
The RETURN VALUES section. |
env |
The ENVIRONMENT section. |
files |
The FILES section. |
exit_status |
The EXIT STATUS section. |
errors |
The ERRORS section. |