Have you ever encountered this error message on AIX before?

 

# man -k loopmount
man: 0703-310 file man not found.
Create the whatis database using the <catman -w> command

Of course you have! If you’ve ever installed AIX from scratch then you have undoubtedly seen this message.

 

And of course, you dutifully executed the ‘catman –w’ command to rectify the situation. Didn’t you?

But what if  ‘catman –w’  doesn’t work as expected?

 

I recently came across this minor issue. Running catman produced the following error message:

 

# catman -w    

catman: 0703-102 /usr/lbin/mkwhatis: The error number is 1.

 

The first place to check was the MANPATH environment variable (which didn’t look right).

 

# echo $MANPATH

:/opt/csm/man

 

So I unset it and ran catman again. This time, with ‘great success’.

 

# unset MANPATH

# catman -w  

 

Now I could search for keywords against the /usr/share/man/whatis database that contain the string “loopmount”.

 

# man -k loopmount

loopmount(1)    - Associate an image file to a loopback device.

 

Another interesting issue I’ve also come across is when catman runs with apparent success but I still can’t find keyword entries when I run  ‘man –k’.

 

# catman -w

# man -k loopmount

loopmount: Cannot find matching entry.

 

I found that manually setting MANPATH and re-running catman rectifies this situation.

 

# export MANPATH=/usr/share/man

# catman -w

# man -k lsvg

loopmount(1)    - Associate an image file to a loopback device.

 

Of course the whatis command can also perform a similar function. Only difference is that you need to know the command beforehand.

 

# whatis loopmount

loopmount(1)    - Associate an image file to a loopback device.

The catman command:

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/aix/v6r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.aix.cmds/doc/aixcmds1/catman.htm

 The whatis command:

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/aix/v6r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.aix.cmds/doc/aixcmds6/whatis.htm

Locating a command by keyword:

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/aix/v6r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.aix.baseadmn/doc/baseadmndita/HT_locating_command_keyword.htm

The /usr/share directory:

 http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/aix/v6r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.aix.baseadmn/doc/baseadmndita/usr_share_dir.htm

 

 

 

Tags:  chris catman whatis aix gibson man