[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 to do with existing database caches being out of date, of the wrong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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