| NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | ENVIRONMENT | FILES | SEE ALSO | AUTHOR | BUGS | COLOPHON | |
|  | 
CATMAN(8)                   Manual pager utils                  CATMAN(8)
       catman - create or update the pre-formatted manual pages
       catman [-d?V] [-M path] [-C file] [section] ...
       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 formatted.
       -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 indicated 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.
       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 5 4 9 6 7", unless overridden by the SECTION
              directive in /usr/local/etc/man_db.conf.
       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 variable is
              handled.
       /usr/local/etc/man_db.conf
              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.
       man(1), manpath(5), mandb(8)
       Wilf. (G.Wilford@ee.surrey.ac.uk).
       Fabrizio Polacco (fpolacco@debian.org).
       Colin Watson (cjwatson@debian.org).
       https://gitlab.com/man-db/man-db/-/issues
       https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?group=man-db
       This page is part of the man-db (manual pager suite) project.
       Information about the project can be found at 
       ⟨http://www.nongnu.org/man-db/⟩.  If you have a bug report for this
       manual page, send it to man-db-devel@nongnu.org.  This page was
       obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨https://gitlab.com/cjwatson/man-db⟩ on 2025-08-11.  (At that
       time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in the
       repository was 2025-05-19.)  If you discover any rendering
       problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is
       a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
       corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
       (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       man-pages@man7.org
2.13.1                          2025-05-02                      CATMAN(8)
Pages that refer to this page: man(1), mandb(8)