I have recently been writing a GUI for the whatis database to display and access man pages in html. To do this I ran makewhatis to create the database and then #man -k . > whatislist to generate a text file that I could read into my GUI. Very similar to the existing gman but gman is not available on my distribution (Fedora) and I could not compile the gman source successfully, so having nothing better to do I wrote my own "jman" in Qt4 C++. My GUI works beautifully! My question however is where is the whatis database stored and in which format? If I could access it directly perhaps I may not have to run a script with #man -k . > whatislist, creating an additional file whatislist?

Can anyone shed any light on this? I feel I am making too much work of this?

man whatis:

Thanks for the info. I found a whatis database in my /var/share/man/whatis which is a text file identical to the one created by 'man -k .' and by checking the makewhatis and whatis scripts in /usr/sbin/ and /usr/bin/ respectively I could see that it was the database they created and used. I should have worked that out before but scripts are not my strong point. I can now update my GUI program to read this database directly.

However, I was unable for find any references to the index type databases that you mentions. I guess this just depends on the distribution?

Yes. On my system for example, there is /var/cache/man/index.db and it is updated by the mandb command.

Thanks again. I have another question, this time on Troff file viewers, that you might be able to help me with but I think I will start a new thread in case others are interested also.