Re: apropos in man corrupted ! - howto fix ?
> At some point, my apropos has gotten corrupted so that it never returns
> anything.
>
> I've tried un-installing man-db, and re-installing it, but it apropos still
> does not work.
>
> Though I'm not sure if this has anything to do with it, when I issue 'catman' as
> super-user, I get the following error:
>
> catman: cannot read database /var/catman/index.bt: No such file or directory
> catman: unable to update /usr/man
> catman: cannot read database /var/catman/local/index.bt: No such file or
> directory
> catman: unable to update /usr/local/man
> catman: cannot read database /var/catman/X11R6/index.bt: No such file or
> directory
> catman: unable to update /usr/X11R6/man
>
> At one point I had suspected that maybe a slink upgrade which I did caused the
> corruption, so I have downgraded to installing the man-db that came with hamm.
I had a simular problem the other day. Then I issued a command that was
something like apropos -d ls (ls being the file i want to find) and
apropos gave me lots of debugging info (i think it was -d flag...not
sure) and it toled me that it was missing some files, namely that
apropos reads files called whatis and are located in /usr/*/man. These
files were missing in both my man dirs and I had to recreat them with
makewhatis (I think it was makewhatis, dont remember for sure). That did
the trick for me.
the command was something like makewhatis /usr/doc/man > /usr/doc/man/whatis
you just pipe the output of makewhatis to this file.
Olafur Jens Sigurdsson
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