How to install "whatis" and what is p_client?

[Laurie A. Krumrey]

i was using glance and I suddenly saw a process named "p_client" popped up and chewed up CPU time for a little while, and then disappeared.
i did a "man p_client", but no matches. i tried "man -k p_client", but "whatis" hasn't been run / installed. How do you install "whatis"? Can I research the man pages by keyword? and do you know what p_client is?
thanks,
Laurie

[Ron Cornwell]

Run cat man from the command line that creates the filw /usr/share/lib/whatis which allows you to do keyword searches of all man pages included in the MANPATH.

[Joseph C. Denman]

command is "catman" not "cat man"

[John Bolene · Accepted solution]

Also be sure and have some time and resources on hand to do this.

It can take an hour or more to index the man pages.

A better solution is get the man2html program from the hpux porting library, expand all the manpages, and load an html version of them to a webserver. This version is searchable.

I can help more if you want to pursue this route.

[Laurie A. Krumrey]

OK I typed in catman and it is taking forever
to run...I hope this is OK, I'm doing this
on a production server.

And I got this error message:

# catman
stdin: not in compressed format

Do I need to interrupt this and control C?

[Joseph C. Denman]

OK ERROR. Do not break. It will finish, just takes awhile.

[Laurie A. Krumrey]

How come my whatis command doesn't work?

And my "man -k p_client" command doesn't work?

How can I search my man pages by keyword?

Should /usr/share/lib/whatis be an executable
file? Because it is not and when I type

#whatis
#sh: whatis: not found

And I found out p_client is part of EMS, which
I don't have a clue is installed and implemented correctly.


Laurie

[John Bolene]

/usr/share/lib/whatis is a database that semi-sorta indexes the man pages.

If the product you are looking for is not loaded, there will not be a man page to index.

Man pages are helpful if you know what you are looking for but sometimes that information can be really hard to locate.

I did search the hp docs site and found the following reference
http://docs.hp.com/cgi-bin/fsearch/framedisplay?top=/hpux/onlinedocs/B5735-90001/B5735-90001_top.html&con=/hpux/onlinedocs/B5735-90001/00/00/8-con.html&toc=/hpux/onlinedocs/B5735-90001/00/00/8-toc.html&searchterms=p_client&queryid=20010406-113646
I searched my html man pages and did not find a reference to p_client.

[Joseph C. Denman]

Once the catman command has finished, you should be able to use the -k option to man.


man -k


...jcd...

[Bill Hassell]

catman read ONLY the 1-liner and creates a simple index. Indexing everything will take a long time (overnight on slow machines). It's better to limit catman to useful pages such as:

catman 11m234

Or to save a lot of time:

catman -w 11m234

This means every page will have to be formatted whereas without -w all the pages will be preformatted and saves time reading a man page.

[Cheryl Griffin]

As Ron said catman creates the /usr/share/lib/whatis which is an index files that allows keyword searches of all man pages included in the MANPATH.

Are you looking for the LINUX command "whatis" which has similar functionality for man pages?
"whatis" is not an HP-UX command, it is an index.

In addition, there is no man page for p_client.
man -k p_client fails because the information does not exist for man.

[Carsten Krege]

p_client is the persistence client that is used by the EMS (Event Monitoring Service). It makes sure that the persistent requests stored in the persistence database /etc/opt/resmon/persistence are registered with the EMS registrar that then starts the EMS monitors.

EMS monitors are used by the Online Diagnostic to report events from devices. There are also other monitors for other products available, e.g. Serviceguard, LVM disks, System resources, ATM, Hyperfabric etc.

More details what EMS is are on:

http://docs.hp.com/hpux/ha/

Carsten