[CLUE-Tech] Still Fighting with man -k

[Jeffery Cann]

Jed,

I think this is rather system dependant.  But, I went snooping around my 
Mandrake 8.2 server and found the following:

/etc/cron.daily/makewhatis.cron

-------------------- makewhatis.cron ------------------
#!/bin/bash
LOCKFILE=/var/lock/makewhatis.lock

# the lockfile is not meant to be perfect, it's just in case the
# two makewhatis cron scripts get run close to each other to keep
# them from stepping on each other's toes.  The worst that will
# happen is that they will temporarily corrupt the database...
[ -f $LOCKFILE ] && exit 0
trap "rm -f $LOCKFILE" EXIT
touch $LOCKFILE
makewhatis -w
exit 0
------------------------ end script -----------------------

Which makes me wonder two things:

1. Why your makewhatis file would be open and thus killed during a system 
shutdown.  Unless you're updating the whatis database file, it really 
shouldn't be open for writing, right?

2.  Is there some type of lock file scheme that's happening?

3.  Did you check your init scripts for (re)building the whatis database?

Jeff