CATMAN(8)

📦
version 2.13.1 · 13 versions
, in debian trixie, ubuntu questing, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

🎀 catman 🎀

Manual pager utils 💅 okay bestie, this is the tool that makes your man pages load super fast ✨

✨ NAME ✨

catman — create or update the pre-formatted manual pages 🌸

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

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

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

okay so catman makes a fresh, up-to-date set of pre-formatted manual pages, aka cat pages 📚 Cat pages are usually way quicker to display than the original manual pages, but they eat up extra storage space, so it's giving trade-off 🍓 Whether you want them at all is up to the local administrator, who has to set up the directories that hold them 🫶

The options catman works with are the manual page hierarchies and the sections you want pre-formatted 🧚 By default, the hierarchies are whatever's listed as system hierarchies in the man-db configuration file. The default sections come from the colon-delimited contents of the $MANSECT environment variable, or the standard set built into man if $MANSECT isn't set at all 💜 If you pass in a whitespace-delimited list of section names, that overrides both of those defaults, no cap 👑

Also, catman uses the index database cache that goes with each hierarchy to figure out which files actually need formatting 🔥 very efficient, very iconic ✨

🌈 OPTIONS 🌈

  • -d, --debug — prints debugging info 🙈
  • -M path, --manpath=path — lets you pick your own colon-delimited manual page hierarchy search path 🗺️ By default, this is every path marked as a system hierarchy in the man-db configuration file
  • -C file, --config-file=file — uses this user configuration file instead of the default, which is ~/.manpath 💅
  • -?, --help — prints a help message and exits 🎀
  • --usage — prints a short usage message and exits 🦋
  • -V, --version — shows the version info ⭐

🧚 ENVIRONMENT 🧚

  • MANSECT — if this is set, its value is a colon-delimited list of sections, and it decides which manual sections get searched 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 the SECTION directive in /etc/manpath.config overrides it 🫶
  • MANPATH — if this is set, its value is read as the colon-delimited manual page hierarchy search path to use 💖 For the default behaviour and the full scoop on how this variable is handled, check the SEARCH PATH section of manpath(5), it's giving detail 📚

📁 FILES 📁

  • /etc/manpath.config — the 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 👑

The legends behind this are:

  • Wilf. (G.Wilford@ee.surrey.ac.uk) 💅
  • Fabrizio Polacco (fpolacco@debian.org) ✨
  • Colin Watson (cjwatson@debian.org) 🫶

🐛 BUGS 🐛

bugs? not on my watch 🙈 Report them here:

Version 2.13.1, dated 2025-05-02, and that's a wrap bestie 🌈💖✨

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