Ever wonder how many MAN pages are indexed on your system?

By looking at the "database" (A simple text file) for the WHATIS command, you can see all MAN pages correctly registered on your system. (Man pages that have not been properly installed will not show up, sometimes add-on software either improperly registers or does not attempt to register the application's man pages, for those, you are on your own.)

Historically, the data file is in /usr/man/whatis, however it may live somewhere else. On my Mandrake 8.2 system, I found it in /var/cache/man/whatis instead. If you do not find it in either place, the following command should find it for you:

locate whatis|grep man/whatis

If that doesn't do the trick, just do a:

locate whatis

and look for files named simply 'whatis' with no .gz/.bzip, etc. and cat or less them to see if they contain a long list of man pages.

If anyone knows of a utility to seek out all UNREGISTERED man pages on a system (and possibly even auto-register them when found!), please reply here!