This document describes the setup, maintenance and use of a generic online manual page system with special reference to the man_db-2.3.x package and it's advanced features.

The general conventions used throughout this manual include file names and paths in italic, eg. /usr/man. variable strings (usually path components) enclosed within <> and in italic, eg. <sec>, program names in bold, eg. man. commands that can be typed at a shell prompt in a eg. environment variables denoted as follows: $ENV_VAR

Copyright © 1995 Graeme W. Wilford

Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a notice identical to this one.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation approved by the copyright holder.
.

Introduction

man_db-2.3.x

man_db-2.3.x is a package that is designed to provide users with online information in a fast and friendly manner while at the same time offering flexibility to the system administrator.

It is made up of several user programs:
	       man	- an interface to the on-line reference manuals
	       whatis	- search the manual page names
	       apropos	- search the manual page names and descriptions
	       manpath	- determine search path for manual pages
several maintenance programs:
	       mandb	- create or update the manual page index caches
	       catman	- create or update the pre-formatted manual pages
and a special pre-formatter that knows about compressed manual pages
	       zsoelim	- satisfy .so requests in roff input