SYNOPSIS

       catman [-dhV] [-M path] [section] ...


DESCRIPTION

       catman  is used to create an up to date set of pre-format­
       ted manual pages known as cat pages.  Cat pages are gener­
       ally  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  hier­
       archies  and  sections to pre-format.  The default hierar­
       chies 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.


OPTIONS

       -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.

       -h, --help
              Print a help message and exit.

       -V, --version
              Display version information.


ENVIRONMENT

       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.

       MANPATH
              If $MANPATH is set, its value is interpreted as the
              colon-delimited manual page hierarchy  search  path
              to use.


AUTHOR

       Wilf. (G.Wilford@ee.surrey.ac.uk).
       Fabrizio Polacco (fpolacco@debian.org).



2.3.19                     14 May 2001                  catman(8)

Man(1) output converted with man2html