Re: mandb

[Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk>]

On Thu 10 Apr 2014 at 09:22:10 -0700, Mike McClain wrote:

> What are the advantages of mandb?

>From mandb(8):

  mandb  is  used to initialise or manually update index database
  caches that are usually maintained by man.  The caches contain
  information relevant to the current state of the manual page system
  and the  information  stored within them is used by the man-db
  utilities to enhance their speed and functionality.

  When  creating  or updating an index, mandb will warn of bad ROFF
  .so requests, bogus manual page filenames and manual pages from
  which the whatis cannot be parsed.

  Supplying mandb with an optional colon-delimited path will override
  the internal system manual  page  hierarchy search path, determined
  from information found within the man-db configuration file.