[CLUE-Tech] Still Fighting with man -k

[Jed S. Baer]

Hi Folks.

I've done everything I can think of, including instrumenting the code in
/usr/sbin/makewhatis, and I still haven't discovered what's truncting
/var/cache/man/whatis. So, the "man -k" command works only rarely.

What I have discovered is this. It appears that the truncation is
appearing at system shutdown. Regrettably, I shut the machine down every
night. No, I'm not going to just leave it on. Besides, this mystery has
now captured my attention.

Note the following evidence:

#ls --full-time -c /var/cache/man/whatis 
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Fri Nov 29 23:28:08 2002 /var/cache/man/whatis

and, from /var/log/messages:

Nov 29 23:28:05 kernel: Kernel logging (proc) stopped.
Nov 29 23:28:05 kernel: Kernel log daemon terminating.
Nov 29 23:28:06 syslog: klogd shutdown succeeded
Nov 29 23:28:06 exiting on signal 15
Nov 30 07:16:12 syslogd 1.4.1: restart. 

Interesting that this is all after the "sending all processes the TERM
signal". At this point, the last vestiges of the kernel are riding off
into the sunset. I thought maybe some dying process might have the file
open, but at the moment, lsof doesn't show the whatis file as being open.

Any thoughts on where to look next would be most appreciated.
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