Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin AT cygwin DOT com X-Injected-Via-Gmane: http://gmane.org/ To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com From: "Mike Maxwell" Subject: apropos, man -k, and makewhatis Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2003 12:59:43 -0500 Lines: 53 Message-ID: X-Complaints-To: usenet AT main DOT gmane DOT org X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1123 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1123 Can you spell frustration? I think I can, but my spell checker is turned off. Anyway-- I wanted to use 'apropos'. I was running this from a Windows Command Shell (I know...), and it tells me it can't find 'apropos'. I beat around inside the Cygwin installer for awhile (the part where it asks you what packages to install), couldn't find it there. Decide maybe 'apropos' is a built-in or alias or s.t. So then I launched bash, and ran 'apropos' again: apropos name name: nothing appropriate Looks fishy, surely there are dozens of man pages that mention "name". Thrashed around on the mailing list archives at Cygwin, eventually found that 'apropos' is just a synonym for 'man -k'. Tried that, and of course got the same result: nothing appropriate. Thrashed around awhile longer, found out I first have to run 'makewhatis'. (Why didn't the install program for 'whatis' or 'man' do that?) Tried that--"command not found". Looked around in the installer again for 'makewhatis', no luck. Eventually found out that I already had it, it's in /usr/sbin, but that's not on my path. (Why install an executable there, and not put the dir on the path? Sigh...) Ran /usr/sbin/makewhatis, get the following error msgs: FIND: Parameter format not correct FIND: Parameter format not correct FIND: Parameter format not correct FIND: Parameter format not correct FIND: Parameter format not correct FIND: Parameter format not correct FIND: Parameter format not correct FIND: Parameter format not correct FIND: Parameter format not correct Looked into the 'makewhatis' file, which turns out to be just a shell script. Opened this in an editor, searched for 'find', found four lines, of which two actually execute. Tried running 'find' using the args in the 'makewhatis' script, and get an error msg, but a different one ("Invalid Switch"). 'makewhatis' has a revision date of 23 March 1996. Maybe there's a newer version somewhere, but since I can't find any reference to it in the Cygwin installer, I don't know. Gave up. Unless you can help me. -- Mike Maxwell Linguistic Data Consortium maxwellNOSPAM AT ldc DOT upenn DOT edu -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Bug reporting: http://cygwin.com/bugs.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/