man -k not working

Allie · 08-01-2009, 01:47 PM

Hello community, I've tried to use man -k [someKeyword] on three distro, ubuntu 6.06, red hat 9 and Fedora core 5 and it never returns any command, it just says "nothing appropriate". What gives? Thanks

joeBuffer · 08-01-2009, 01:51 PM

What did you use for a keyword?

colucix · 08-01-2009, 01:52 PM

Hi and welcome to LQ!

Can you provide an example of a keyword you used? I'd like to try on my Opensuse, since if I look for common words it works. Do the man pages work properly? And the apropos command?

Allie · 08-01-2009, 01:56 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by joeBuffer

What did you use for a keyword?

I've tried all sorts of keyword such as disk, volume, raid. It didn't matter what word I type, it just doesn't work. Does the man page need to build a cache of keywords into a database of some sort? I've also tried apropos and still I don't get anything.

joeBuffer · 08-01-2009, 01:56 PM

Have you tried using mandb?
The mandb command is for creating or updating the caches.

Berhanie · 08-01-2009, 02:34 PM

Quote:

Does the man page need to build a cache of keywords into a database of some sort?

Yes, it's done using makewhatis. RehHat-type distros have a daily cronjob for it that
does this:

Code:

makewhatis -u -w

joeBuffer · 08-01-2009, 02:52 PM

I've read things that say mandb and things that say makewhatis, they're both used for this, but different distributions use different things.

Allie · 08-01-2009, 02:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Berhanie

Yes, it's done using makewhatis. RehHat-type distros have a daily cronjob for it that
does this:

Code:

makewhatis -u -w

That was it! I typed in this command and it took awhile to build the cache but right afterwards it work. This was for Fedora 5. On my RH 9, I didn't have to do anything and today man -k returned results so system must have automatically built the cache. I've tried mandb on RedHat distro but this command doesn't work. It may be for another distro but same concept. Cool.

joeBuffer · 08-01-2009, 03:02 PM

That's good.
I read just after posting here that makewhatis is used for some and mandb for others, I'm using Ubuntu 9.10 and it doesn't come with makewhatis, and I read that Debian also uses mandb ... so if you use it for Ubuntu you might have to use mandb unless you install makewhatis ...