Manual: catman

CATMAN(8)					     Manual pager utils						   CATMAN(8)

NAME
       catman - create or update the pre-formatted manual pages

SYNOPSIS
       catman [-d?V] [-M path] [-C file] [section] ...

DESCRIPTION
       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 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 $MANSECT or the standard set compiled into man  if	$MANSECT  is
       undefined.  Supplying catman with a set of whitespace-delimited section names will override both of the above.

       catman  makes use of the index database cache associated with each hierarchy to determine which files need to be for‐
       matted.

OPTIONS
       -d, --debug
	      Print debugging information.

       -M path, --manpath=path
	      Specify an alternate colon-delimited manual page hierarchy search path.  By default, this is all	paths  indi‐
	      cated as system hierarchies in the man-db configuration file.

       -C file, --config-file=file
	      Use this user configuration file rather than the default of ~/.manpath.

       -?, --help
	      Print a help message and exit.

       --usage
	      Print a short usage message and exit.

       -V, --version
	      Display version information.

ENVIRONMENT
       MANSECT
	      If  $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 "1 n l 8 3 0 2 3type 3posix 3pm 3perl 3am 5 4  9  6	 7",
	      unless overridden by the SECTION directive in /etc/manpath.config.

       MANPATH
	      If $MANPATH is set, its value is interpreted as the colon-delimited manual page hierarchy search path to use.

	      See  the SEARCH PATH section of manpath(5) for the default behaviour and details of how this environment vari‐
	      able is handled.

FILES
       /etc/manpath.config
	      man-db configuration file.

       /usr/man/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)
	      A traditional global index database cache.

       /var/catman/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)
	      An alternate or FSSTND compliant global index database cache.

SEE ALSO
       man(1), manpath(5), mandb(8)

AUTHOR
       Wilf. (G.Wilford@ee.surrey.ac.uk).
       Fabrizio Polacco (fpolacco@debian.org).
       Colin Watson (cjwatson@debian.org).

BUGS
       https://gitlab.com/man-db/man-db/-/issues
       https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?group=man-db

2.13.1							 2025-05-02						   CATMAN(8)