.\" Man page for catman
.\"
.\" Copyright (C), 1994, 1995, Graeme W. Wilford. (Wilf.)
.\"
.\" You may distribute under the terms of the GNU General Public
.\" License as specified in the file COPYING that comes with the
.\" man-db distribution.
.\"
.\" Sat Dec 10 14:17:29 GMT 1994  Wilf. (G.Wilford@ee.surrey.ac.uk)
.\"
.pc
.TH %thcatman% 8 "%date%" "%version%" "Manual pager utils"
.SH NAME
%catman% \- create or update the pre-formatted manual pages
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B %catman%
.RB [\| \-d?V \|]
.RB [\| \-M
.IR path \|]
.RB [\| \-C
.IR file \|]
.RI [\| section \|]
\&.\|.\|.
.SH DESCRIPTION
.B %catman%
is used to create an up to date set of pre-formatted manual pages known as
cat pages.
Cat pages are generally 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
.B %catman%
are the manual page hierarchies and sections to pre-format.
The default hierarchies 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
.RB $ MANSECT
or the standard set compiled into
.B %man%
if
.RB $ MANSECT
is undefined.
Supplying
.B %catman%
with a set of whitespace-delimited section names will override both of
the above.

.B %catman%
makes use of the
.B index
database cache associated with each hierarchy to determine which files
need to be formatted.
.SH OPTIONS
.TP
.if !'po4a'hide' .BR \-d ", " \-\-debug
Print debugging information.
.TP
.BI \-M\  path \fR,\ \fB\-\-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.
.TP
.BI \-C\  file \fR,\ \fB\-\-config\-file= file
Use this user configuration file rather than the default of
.IR ~/.manpath .
.TP
.if !'po4a'hide' .BR \-? ", " \-\-help
Print a help message and exit.
.TP
.if !'po4a'hide' .B \-\-usage
Print a short usage message and exit.
.TP
.if !'po4a'hide' .BR \-V ", " \-\-version
Display version information.
.SH ENVIRONMENT
.TP
.if !'po4a'hide' .B MANSECT
If
.RB $ 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.
The default is "%sections%", unless overridden by the
.B SECTION
directive in
.IR %manpath_config_file% .
.TP
.if !'po4a'hide' .B MANPATH
If
.RB $ MANPATH
is set, its value is interpreted as the colon-delimited manual page
hierarchy search path to use.

See the
.B SEARCH PATH
section of
.BR manpath (5)
for the default behaviour and details of how this environment variable is
handled.
.SH FILES
.TP
.if !'po4a'hide' .I %manpath_config_file%
man-db configuration file.
.TP
.if !'po4a'hide' .I /usr/man/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)
A traditional global
.I index
database cache.
.TP
.if !'po4a'hide' .I /var/catman/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)
An alternate or FSSTND
compliant global
.I index
database cache.
.SH "SEE ALSO"
.if !'po4a'hide' .BR %man% (1),
.if !'po4a'hide' .BR manpath (5),
.if !'po4a'hide' .BR %mandb% (8)
.SH AUTHOR
.nf
.if !'po4a'hide' Wilf.\& (G.Wilford@ee.surrey.ac.uk).
.if !'po4a'hide' Fabrizio Polacco (fpolacco@debian.org).
.if !'po4a'hide' Colin Watson (cjwatson@debian.org).
.fi
.SH BUGS
.if !'po4a'hide' https://gitlab.com/cjwatson/man-db/-/issues
.br
.if !'po4a'hide' https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?group=man-db
