Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 474333
makewhatis creates highly incomplete whatis database
Last modified: 2008-12-03 07:56:21 EST
Created attachment 325523 [details] generated /var/cache/man/whatis [root@trinity ~]# time makewhatis -u -w real 0m2.560s user 0m1.375s sys 0m1.381s [dr@trinity ~]$ wc -l /var/cache/man/whatis 76 /var/cache/man/whatis [dr@trinity ~]$ find /usr/share/man/ -type f | wc -l 12566 [root@trinity ~]# man lftp | col -b | grep -A 1 ^NAME NAME lftp - Sophisticated file transfer program [root@trinity ~]# apropos transfer transfer: nothing appropriate I haven't found a pattern yet what those 76 man pages are being indexed, but others not. I'm going to attach the whatis-cachefile (which is plain text). Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): man-1.6f-11.fc10.i386
The problem is you uses "-u" flag which means makewhatis only update /var/cache/man/whatis database (add man pages which were changed in last 24 hours). If the problem persists if you remove this flag please reopen this bug.
OK, I can see the problem now. The daily cron job runs -u, the weekly doesn't. After a fresh install, the database only gets created when the weekly cronjob has ran once. As far as I can see, anacron should make sure that this is being done ASAP, but effectively doesn't here. Looking at my process list, anacron doesn't look too healthy: root 2562 0.0 0.0 1936 768 ? SNs 11:48 0:00 anacron -s root 17016 0.0 0.0 4808 1104 ? SN 13:42 0:00 /bin/bash /etc/cron.weekly/0anacron root 17017 0.0 0.0 4456 728 ? SN 13:42 0:00 awk -v progname=/etc/cron.weekly/0anacron progname {????? print progname ":\n"????? progname="";???? }???? { print; } Something's "hanging" there... makewhatis -w does what it is supposed to do, I guess the problem at hand lies within anacron's realm. Thanks for spotting the -u flag, I should have checked invocation parameters.