Re: apropos does nothing

["Jeffrey W. Baker" <jwbaker@acm.org>]

On Tue, 2002-01-22 at 04:04, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 22, 2002 at 10:20:12AM +0000, Karl E. Jorgensen wrote:
> > On Mon, Jan 21, 2002 at 07:29:11PM -0800, Jeffrey W. Baker wrote:
> > > Somehow I have an unstable installation where apropos doesn't do a damn
> > > thing:
> > > 
> > > jwb@noodles:/var$ apropos ls
> > > ls: nothing appropriate.
> > > jwb@noodles:/var$ apropos apropos
> > > apropos: nothing appropriate.
> > > [snip]
> > 
> > I've had that problem from time to time (especially after upgrades).
> 
> What kind of upgrades?
> 
> > Running
> >     # mandb
> > sorts it out.
> 
> I advise running it as the 'man' user rather than root. If you have the
> man-db utilities installed setuid, you can do it as an ordinary user.
> 
> > There *should* be a weekly cron job (/etc/cron.weekly/man-db) that does
> > that (at least there is here, and I didn't create it...)
> 
> Yes, there is, and in cron.daily. The manual database doesn't get
> updated as insanely often as it used to, because that annoyed the hell
> out of people who were just trying to view individual pages. This may
> mean you need to run mandb yourself if you want things to show up in the
> database in a hurry.

Thanks for the information.  This is almost certainly the problem,
because this particular computer is more often shutdown than running. 
Therefore none of the cron jobs scheduled at 0600 local time have run.

Cheers,
Jeffrey