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CATMAN(8) Manual pager utils CATMAN(8) catman - create or update the pre-formatted manual pages
catman [-d?V] [-M path] [-C file] [section] ...
catman is used to create an up to date set of pre-formatted manual pages known as cat pages. Cat pages are generally much faster to display than the original manual pages, but require extra storage space. The decision to support cat pages is that of the local administrator, who must provide suitable directories to contain them. The options available to catman are the manual page hierarchies and sections to pre-format. The default hierarchies are those specified as system hierarchies in the man-db configuration file, and the default sections are either the colon-delimited contents of the environment variable $MANSECT or the standard set compiled into man if $MANSECT is undefined. Supplying catman with a set of whitespace-delimited section names will override both of the above. catman makes use of the index database cache associated with each hierarchy to determine which files need to be formatted.
-d, --debug Print debugging information. -M path, --manpath=path Specify an alternate colon-delimited manual page hierarchy search path. By default, this is all paths indicated as system hierarchies in the man-db configuration file. -C file, --config-file=file Use this user configuration file rather than the default of ~/.manpath. -?, --help Print a help message and exit. --usage Print a short usage message and exit. -V, --version Display version information.
MANSECT If $MANSECT is set, its value is a colon-delimited list of sections and it is used to determine which manual sections to search and in what order. The default is "1 n l 8 3 0 2 3type 5 4 9 6 7", unless overridden by the SECTION directive in /usr/local/etc/man_db.conf. MANPATH If $MANPATH is set, its value is interpreted as the colon- delimited manual page hierarchy search path to use. See the SEARCH PATH section of manpath(5) for the default behaviour and details of how this environment variable is handled.
/usr/local/etc/man_db.conf man-db configuration file. /usr/man/index.(bt|db|dir|pag) A traditional global index database cache. /var/catman/index.(bt|db|dir|pag) An alternate or FSSTND compliant global index database cache.
man(1), manpath(5), mandb(8)
Wilf. (G.Wilford@ee.surrey.ac.uk). Fabrizio Polacco (fpolacco@debian.org). Colin Watson (cjwatson@debian.org).
https://gitlab.com/man-db/man-db/-/issues https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?group=man-db
This page is part of the man-db (manual pager suite) project. Information about the project can be found at ⟨http://www.nongnu.org/man-db/⟩. If you have a bug report for this manual page, send it to man-db-devel@nongnu.org. This page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository ⟨https://gitlab.com/cjwatson/man-db⟩ on 2025-08-11. (At that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in the repository was 2025-05-19.) If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to man-pages@man7.org 2.13.1 2025-05-02 CATMAN(8) Pages that refer to this page: man(1), mandb(8)
| HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. | |