[CLUE-Tech] man -k stopped working

[Jed S. Baer]

Hi Folks.

I'm stumped. At some point (since the last time I used it, whenever that
was), "man -k" or "apropos" has stopped working. Fer example:

$ man -k print
print: nothing appropriate

After looking at a few man pages (viewing man pages works fine for a
variety of commands), and in particular the man, apropos, and whatis
pages, I find no clues. Looking at the code for /usr/bin/whatis, it
appears it relies on content in /var/cache/man/whatis, which is an empty
file (now). Looking at the code for /usr/sbin/makewhatis, I find I don't
want to decipher it. ;-) Seriously, nothing obvious looks amiss:

# makewhatis -u -w -v
about to enter /usr/share/man
about to enter /usr/local/man
about to enter /usr/X11R6/man
about to enter /usr/kerberos/man
about to enter /usr/lib/perl5/man
about to enter /usr/man
about to enter /usr/share/man
about to enter /usr/local/man
about to enter /usr/X11R6/man
about to enter /usr/kerberos/man
about to enter /usr/lib/perl5/man
about to enter /usr/man

Except that it doesn't run for long enough to be finding any man pages.

Obviously, it's following the default manpath, as it should. Doing a
directory of /usr/share/man/man1, and then a "man -k" on something from
that directory gets the "nothing appropriate error".

Also, obviously, the whatis command no longer works either.

I cannot conceive of any changes to my system which would cause this
problem. For the record, yes, I'm running makewhatis as root.

Tripwire doesn't report makewhatis as a changed file.

I can't imagine this having an effect, but I guess I'll mention that,
unfortunately, I have to shut my machine down every night. So, some cron
jobs aren't being run. (Different problem there -- anacron doesn't seem to
be doing it's job.) I just run them manually every once in a while, like
makewhatis, etc.

Any thoughts?

jed
-- 
We're frogs who are getting boiled in a pot full of single-character
morphemes, and we don't notice. - Larry Wall; Perl6, Apocalypse 5