lfs-book/appendixa/man-desc.xml

<sect2><title>Contents of Man-&man-contversion;</title>

<sect3><title>Program Files</title>
<para>apropos, makewhatis, man, man2dvi, man2html and
whatis</para></sect3>

<sect3><title>Descriptions</title>

<sect4><title>apropos</title>
<para>apropos searches a set of database files containing short descriptions 
of system commands for keywords and  displays the result on the standard 
output.</para></sect4>

<sect4><title>makewhatis</title>
<para>makewhatis reads all the manual pages contained in given sections of 
manpath or the pre-formatted pages contained in the given sections of 
catpath. For  each  page, it writes a line in the whatis database; each 
line consists of the name of the page  and  a  short  description, 
separated  by a dash. The description is extracted using the content of 
the NAME section of the manual page.</para></sect4>

<sect4><title>man</title>
<para>man formats and displays the on-line manual pages.</para></sect4>

<sect4><title>man2dvi</title>
<para>man2dvi converts a manual page into dvi format.</para></sect4>

<sect4><title>man2html</title>
<para>man2html converts a manual page into html.</para></sect4>

<sect4><title>whatis</title>
<para>whatis searches a set of database files containing short descriptions 
of system commands for keywords and displays the result on the standard 
output. Only complete word matches are displayed.</para></sect4>

</sect3>

</sect2>