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I was following a tutorial and thought why not...let me brush up on the man command...and low and behold I learned a few things after years working with different flavours of Unix.

On my RHEL7 however, trying out the new trick to be able to look-up keywords failed!

It sounds crazy, but having tried it under root and under my own username the following shows no results...now man has dozens of entries with time as a keyword...any help would be appreciated, as I think the keyword facility is very useful for and admin.

$ man -k time
time: nothing appropriate.
steve
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Beezer
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  • I did do a search before posting this newbie type question. The question listed at the top of this page as the duplicate, is similar but not what I have actually posed. The duplicate above listed as the answer returns values to the user; additionally it is [apropos] specific and although yes...they are equivalent, again, I think my question, from a newbie perspective is very helpful. Finally, and this might be overkill, but the man -k command, should at least output a hint regarding the building of the search key command to give a newbie a clue. For all those Linux gurus out there, sorry! – Beezer Nov 14 '16 at 08:02

1 Answers1

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Need to create the database. mandb -c should do it. Example below.

# man -k foo
foo: nothing appropriate.
# mandb -c
Processing manual pages under /usr/share/man...
...
Checking for stray cats under /var/cache/man/local...
89 man subdirectories contained newer manual pages.
7168 manual pages were added.
0 stray cats were added.
# man -k foo
ip-fou (8)           - Foo-over-UDP receive port configuration
#

Manual page for mandb can be found here, see "-c" option.

steve
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