Re: apropos, man -k, and makewhatis

[Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha at cs dot nyu dot edu>]

On Fri, 21 Mar 2003, Mike Maxwell wrote:

> Can you spell frustration?  I think I can, but my spell checker is turned
> off.  Anyway--
>
> I wanted to use 'apropos'.  I was running this from a Windows Command Shell
> (I know...), and it tells me it can't find 'apropos'.  I beat around inside
> the Cygwin installer for awhile (the part where it asks you what packages to
> install), couldn't find it there.
> Decide maybe 'apropos' is a built-in or alias or s.t.  So then I launched
> bash, and ran 'apropos' again:
>     apropos name
>     name: nothing appropriate
> Looks fishy, surely there are dozens of man pages that mention "name".
>
> Thrashed around on the mailing list archives at Cygwin, eventually found
> that 'apropos' is just a synonym for 'man -k'.  Tried that, and of course
> got the same result: nothing appropriate.
>
> Thrashed around awhile longer, found out I first have to run 'makewhatis'.
> (Why didn't the install program for 'whatis' or 'man' do that?)  Tried
> that--"command not found".  Looked around in the installer again for
> 'makewhatis', no luck.  Eventually found out that I already had it, it's in
> /usr/sbin, but that's not on my path.  (Why install an executable there, and
> not put the dir on the path? Sigh...)
>
> Ran /usr/sbin/makewhatis, get the following error msgs:
>
> FIND: Parameter format not correct
> FIND: Parameter format not correct
> FIND: Parameter format not correct
> FIND: Parameter format not correct
> FIND: Parameter format not correct
> FIND: Parameter format not correct
> FIND: Parameter format not correct
> FIND: Parameter format not correct
> FIND: Parameter format not correct
>
> Looked into the 'makewhatis' file, which turns out to be just a shell
> script.  Opened this in an editor, searched for 'find', found four lines, of
> which two actually execute.  Tried running 'find' using the args in the
> 'makewhatis' script, and get an error msg, but a different one ("Invalid
> Switch").
>
> 'makewhatis' has a revision date of 23 March 1996.  Maybe there's a newer
> version somewhere, but since I can't find any reference to it in the Cygwin
> installer, I don't know.
>
> Gave up.  Unless you can help me.

The messages from find indicate that you are not running the right find
(i.e., the Windows FIND command is in the path before the Cygwin one).

One possible solution is to run /usr/sbin/makewhatis from a bash shell
(i.e., run "bash --login -i" first).
	Igor
-- 
				http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/
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ZZZzz /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_		igor at watson dot ibm dot com
     |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'		Igor Pechtchanski
    '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) fL	a.k.a JaguaR-R-R-r-r-r-.-.-.  Meow!

Oh, boy, virtual memory! Now I'm gonna make myself a really *big* RAMdisk!
  -- /usr/games/fortune


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