[PLUG] Cleaning up cron.weekly/makewhatis.cron

Keith Morse kgmorse at mpcu.com
Sun Sep 29 21:06:40 UTC 2002


On Sun, 29 Sep 2002, Rich Shepard wrote:

> On Sun, 29 Sep 2002, Anthony Schlemmer wrote:
> 
> > I've seen people reporting this problem before and it may have something 
> > to do with existing database caches being out of date, of the wrong 
> > version, or corrupt.
> 
>   Makes sense to me.
>  
> > You might try running:
> > 
> > "mandb --create"
> > 
> > This will cause all databases to be recreated from scratch. 
> 
>   I did -- there's no mandb on my RH system. Apropos "man" and "rebuild"
> yield no clues, either. Have I missed something here?
> 

This thread got me curious.  Like you, I could find no reference to 
"mandb" on my rh box.  So..  I got to looking.

The man rpm lists two cron entries.

/etc/cron.daily/makewhatis.cron
/etc/cron.weekly/makewhatis.cron


The only difference I can see is the:

	daily does  "makewhatis -u -w"
and
	weekly does "makewhatis -w"

Supplying a bogus arguement to makewhatis results in:

Usage: makewhatis [-u] [-v] [-w] [manpath] [-c [catpath]]
       This will build the whatis database for the man pages
       found in manpath and the cat pages found in catpath.
       -u: update database with new pages
       -v: verbose
       -w: use manpath obtained from `man --path`
       [manpath]: man directories (default: /usr/share/man:/usr/man)
       [catpath]: cat directories (default: the first existing
           directory in 
/var/cache/man:/usr/share/man/preformat:/usr/man/preformat:/usr/share/man:/usr/man)


So the weekly run runs makewhatis but doesn't update it.  ???


makewhatis is a bourne shell script.  As far as I can determine, the 
makewhatis database is found at /var/cache/man/whatis.


I wonder if running a "makewhatis -u -w -v" would clear this?






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