It appears that the 'catman' command has been deprecated/deleted from RedHat Linux; is there something that replaced this functionality?

Man pages in Linux are typically gzipped so you can use gunzip or zcat with them.

That doesn't solve the issue I'm facing. We develop a software product and our man pages aren't getting index in Linux the way they are in other OS's; ie you can't do a "man -k foobar" and see the man pages with the foobar product. The command "catman -w" builds windex file in other OS's, ie HP-UX, Solaris, AIX. Linux, as usual, has decided to go a different route and not leave any breadcrumbs behind.

Linux is NOT Unix. Just as not all UNIX variants do things the same way there is no reason to expect Linux to do things the same way. Although most UNIX flavors now do things the SysV way they didn't always - some did it that way and some did it the Berkley way. Even now not all of them have the same flags for every command or put the output of say "ls -l" or "ps -ef" in exactly the same columns.

Linux does leave "breadcrumbs". Typing "man man" would lead you to information about the way it does things including use of /etc/man.config for what you're trying to do and there is a "man man.config" for more details on that file.

Also since there are many Linux distros you might even have to make your program aware of which distro you intend to run it on. They don't all do it the RedHat way or if they do they don't necessarily put the config file in the same place.

How to update man keywords database
Man keywords database allow you to search for man pages using keywords, the database needs to be updated when ever man pages are added or removed.

This is how you do it for various *nix types:

Debian/Ubuntu/SUSE: mandb
RHEL/CENTOS/SL/Fedora makewhatis
AIX/Solaris/HP-UX catman -w

Have Fun!