For some odd reason, the "whatis" command in my Unix shell (cygwin) is not working. It constantly returns "ls: nothing appropriate" or "cd: nothing appropriate". I'm wondering if there is something incorrectly set-up. Does anyone have any light to shed? Thanks!
Unix (Cygwin) whatis: returns all commands as "nothing appropriate"
From the Cygwin FAQ:
Why doesn't man -k (or apropos) work?
Before you can use man -k or apropos, you must create the whatis database. Just run the command
mandb(it may take a minute to complete).
(Note: It used to say /usr/sbin/makewhatis instead of mandb in older versions of that FAQ.)
man opens manual pages. apropos and whatis search an index for relevant manual pages. Try running man man, man apropos and man whatis for more details on what each of them do, and feel free to ask a new question if you're still stuck. –
Lammastide On Fedora, I had to run this as
sudo for it to update –
Owlet I ran into a similar issue using the 64-bit Red Hat Cygwin installation.
In my case, /usr/sbin/makewhatis did not exist. Running man and a command worked, but neither apropos nor whatis returned anything other than "nothing appropriate".
After searching for a missing package and binging a bunch, I Read The Friendly Manual page for man and found out about mandb.
Running mandb solved my problem.
+1 In MSYS2 too there wasn't a
makewhatis, but mandb worked! Thanks for your suggestion :) –
Liss This answer also applies to vanilla 64-bit Cygwin. –
Orthorhombic
From the Cygwin FAQ:
Why doesn't man -k (or apropos) work?
Before you can use man -k or apropos, you must create the whatis database. Just run the command
mandb(it may take a minute to complete).
(Note: It used to say /usr/sbin/makewhatis instead of mandb in older versions of that FAQ.)
man opens manual pages. apropos and whatis search an index for relevant manual pages. Try running man man, man apropos and man whatis for more details on what each of them do, and feel free to ask a new question if you're still stuck. –
Lammastide On Fedora, I had to run this as
sudo for it to update –
Owlet Run sudo mandb once
Not sure if this helps, but when I ran mandb, I got this (over several attempts).
mandb
0 man subdirectories contained newer manual pages.
0 manual pages were added.
0 stray cats were added.
0 old database entries were purged.
However,
sudo mandb
75 man subdirectories contained newer manual pages.
7235 manual pages were added.
0 stray cats were added.
0 old database entries were purged.
worked for real.
My problem was fixed by running #mandb command
[root@localhost log]# whatis last
last (1) - show a listing of last logged in users
[root@localhost log]#
sudo mandb solved the problem for me. It regenerates the apropos database, but you have to make sure you run it with sudo.
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type whatis? – Hight