Apropos on Arch returns "Nothing Appropriate," no makewhatis command

Question

I've been having a problem with apropos on both my Arch linux install and my ArchBang install.

When I run the apropos or the whatis command, it returns "nothing appropriate" for anything I enter, including even things like 'man' and 'ls'.

Other sources have suggested running the makewhatis command, but both my systems can't find that command. I looked in the /usr/sbin directory, and there's no makewhatis binary located there.

I reinstalled the entire man package, but that made no other changes.

Could this possibly not be present in the packages stored in the arch RPMs?

Solution

You'll have to run mandb as root and run it again, every time you've installed new manpages.