> At some point, my apropos has gotten corrupted so that it never returns > anything. > > I've tried un-installing man-db, and re-installing it, but it apropos still > does not work. > > Though I'm not sure if this has anything to do with it, when I issue 'catman' > as > super-user, I get the following error: > > catman: cannot read database /var/catman/index.bt: No such file or directory > catman: unable to update /usr/man > catman: cannot read database /var/catman/local/index.bt: No such file or > directory > catman: unable to update /usr/local/man > catman: cannot read database /var/catman/X11R6/index.bt: No such file or > directory > catman: unable to update /usr/X11R6/man > > At one point I had suspected that maybe a slink upgrade which I did caused the > corruption, so I have downgraded to installing the man-db that came with hamm.
I had a simular problem the other day. Then I issued a command that was something like apropos -d ls (ls being the file i want to find) and apropos gave me lots of debugging info (i think it was -d flag...not sure) and it toled me that it was missing some files, namely that apropos reads files called whatis and are located in /usr/*/man. These files were missing in both my man dirs and I had to recreat them with makewhatis (I think it was makewhatis, dont remember for sure). That did the trick for me. the command was something like makewhatis /usr/doc/man > /usr/doc/man/whatis you just pipe the output of makewhatis to this file. Olafur Jens Sigurdsson
