apropos, man -k, and makewhatis

["Mike Maxwell" <maxwell at ldc dot upenn dot edu>]

Can you spell frustration?  I think I can, but my spell checker is turned
off.  Anyway--

I wanted to use 'apropos'.  I was running this from a Windows Command Shell
(I know...), and it tells me it can't find 'apropos'.  I beat around inside
the Cygwin installer for awhile (the part where it asks you what packages to
install), couldn't find it there.
Decide maybe 'apropos' is a built-in or alias or s.t.  So then I launched
bash, and ran 'apropos' again:
    apropos name
    name: nothing appropriate
Looks fishy, surely there are dozens of man pages that mention "name".

Thrashed around on the mailing list archives at Cygwin, eventually found
that 'apropos' is just a synonym for 'man -k'.  Tried that, and of course
got the same result: nothing appropriate.

Thrashed around awhile longer, found out I first have to run 'makewhatis'.
(Why didn't the install program for 'whatis' or 'man' do that?)  Tried
that--"command not found".  Looked around in the installer again for
'makewhatis', no luck.  Eventually found out that I already had it, it's in
/usr/sbin, but that's not on my path.  (Why install an executable there, and
not put the dir on the path? Sigh...)

Ran /usr/sbin/makewhatis, get the following error msgs:

FIND: Parameter format not correct
FIND: Parameter format not correct
FIND: Parameter format not correct
FIND: Parameter format not correct
FIND: Parameter format not correct
FIND: Parameter format not correct
FIND: Parameter format not correct
FIND: Parameter format not correct
FIND: Parameter format not correct

Looked into the 'makewhatis' file, which turns out to be just a shell
script.  Opened this in an editor, searched for 'find', found four lines, of
which two actually execute.  Tried running 'find' using the args in the
'makewhatis' script, and get an error msg, but a different one ("Invalid
Switch").

'makewhatis' has a revision date of 23 March 1996.  Maybe there's a newer
version somewhere, but since I can't find any reference to it in the Cygwin
installer, I don't know.

Gave up.  Unless you can help me.
-- 
     Mike Maxwell
     Linguistic Data Consortium
     maxwellNOSPAM at ldc dot upenn dot edu




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