chkman − check the consistency of manual pages

chkman

The chkman utility scans all manual pages and checks their consistency. Currently, it reports manual page cross references that either point to a non-existent manual page or are ambiguous.
The chkman utility works by examining all (optionally compressed) unformatted manual pages located in /usr/share/man. When a manual page cross reference, marked using the .Xr macro, points to a manual page that does not exist, an undefined reference error is printed on the command’s standard error. Similarly, when a manual page cross reference does not specify a section, and a page with the given name appears in more than one manual section an ambiguous reference error is printed.
Before processing tha manual pages chkman will try to open the file chkman.ok to read a set of error exceptions. The chkman.ok file can contain blank lines, and comments starting with a # character. In addition, lines of the type
xrok name section
will make chkman assume that the specified manual page exists (and avoid the reporting of the respective undefined references), while lines of the type
skip filename
will make chkman skip the checking of the specified manual page.
The chkman utility goes to great lengths to avoid generating noisy output. All errors are reported only once for every page the are found in, and hard-linked manual pages referring to the same set of entities are examined just one time.

manual pages checked
chkman.ok’ error reporting exception file

mdoc(7)

For each error found, chkman will print an error message containing the name of the file being scanned and the line number on which the error was found. Otherwise no output is produced.
The chkman utility returns EX_DATAERR if errors were found in the manual pages, and EX_OK otherwise.

The chkman utility and this manual page were written by Diomidis Spinellis ⟨dds@aueb.gr⟩.

Should check for additional manual page style errors.

FreeBSD 4.8 April 27, 2003 1