Man pages?

[Richard Todd]

shaff at elements.rpal.com (Mike Shaff) writes:
>the information to be passed their way if I got any pointers).  Is there really
>no one out there who has successfully gotten the whatis database to include new
>man pages?

Either that or noone has cared sufficiently to look into it.  (Personally, I
don't recall ever having *used* the whatis database, so I haven't really
had an incentive to look into seeing how it can be updated...)  Looks like
a straight text file, so you should be able to just add the appropriate 
lines to the whatis database by hand, or do some suitably clever automatic
massaging of the troff source to the man pages.

>Further, I have come to a realization that I can not find any documentation on
>adding man pages with regards to compaction, etc.  (No, we have not gotten our
>stand-alone documents yet, so I can not read the manual)

Well, one might have tried looking through /usr/bin/man (it *is* a shell 
script, unlike on BSD), so you can readily find what the proper format is.  
In any event, here is a shell script that'll convert a man page (in troff-input
format) to the proper format to be put in one of the /usr/catman/?_man/man? 
directories (give the name of the man page as the first argument; note that
this *will* trample on your original troff source file.)  Enjoy.
------------
#!/bin/sh
# convert a man page to nroffed packed format
target=$1
dir=`dirname $1`
nroff -man $target >$dir/convman$$
mv $dir/convman$$ $target
pack $target
--
Richard Todd	rmtodd at uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu  rmtodd at chinet.chi.il.us
	rmtodd at servalan.uucp
Motorola Skates On Intel's Head!