What is makewhatis.cron?

a305587

• July 17, 2019 11:08

Hello, I am getting daily emails from our server that contain the following: /etc/cron.daily/makewhatis.cron: /usr/sbin/makewhatis: line 446: /var/cache/man/whatis: Is a directory I did a search on these forums and Google and did not come up with this particular issue elsewhere. Can anyone tell me what this means and why I'm getting them daily? Do I need to take action, can I turn it off? Thank you.

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  nixuser

  • July 17, 2019 16:44

  from man whatis command: DESCRIPTION Each manual page has a short description available within it. whatis searches the manual page names and displays the manual page descrip? tions of any name matched. So the cron is to update the manuals.

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  a305587

  • July 17, 2019 18:20

  from man whatis command: DESCRIPTION Each manual page has a short description available within it. whatis searches the manual page names and displays the manual page descrip? tions of any name matched. So the cron is to update the manuals.

  
  Thank you for the response. Odd I would start receiving these now out of the blue. It's telling me something is a directory? Do you know why it's doing this (is this something I need to be concerned about?) and how to make it stop?

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  cPanelMichael

  • July 22, 2019 20:11

  Hello @a305587, I recommend submitting a

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  a305587

  • August 01, 2019 16:41

  Thank you cPanelMichael. I opened a support ticket and one of your support technicians (Timothy G.) was very helpful in assisting me. I'm going to post the solution here in case another party has the same issue and finds this thread via search. The issue was the file: /etc/cron.daily/makewhatis.cron I have to remove the file out of that directory, to another folder (such as /root). Alternatively we can disable executable permissions from it: (ex. chmod -x /etc/cron.daily/makewhatis.cron ) The file was added by some system application man which is # rpm -qf /etc/cron.daily/makewhatis.cron man-1.6f-39.el6.x86_64 Info on the package providing that file. Description : The man package includes three tools for finding information and/or : documentation about your Linux system: man, apropos, and whatis. The : man system formats and displays on-line manual pages about commands or : functions on your system. Apropos searches the whatis database : (containing short descriptions of system commands) for a string. : Whatis searches its own database for a complete word. : : The man package should be installed on your system because it is the : primary way to find documentation on a Linux system. Many thanks to Timothy G. from cPanel for this information. I ultimately moved the file out of the /etc/ folder and into root and this stopped my daily warning emails. Problem resolved. Thanks everybody.

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  nixuser

  • August 01, 2019 18:05

  Glad that it's sorted out and thank you for posting the solution.

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