any ideas?

[ieuuk]

hey... my server just sent me an email saying...

/etc/cron.weekly/00-makewhatis.cron:


zcat: stdout: Broken pipe

zcat: stdout: Broken pipe

and it just keeps saying "zcat: stdout: Broken pipe" about another 30 times, and i have no idea what it means.

any ideas what this is all about?

thanks

[ieuuk]

just did a man zcat and got...

zcat is identical to gunzip -c. (On some systems, zcat may be
installed as gzcat to preserve the original link to compress.) zcat
uncompresses either a list of files on the command line or its stan-
dard input and writes the uncompressed data on standard output. zcat
will uncompress files that have the correct magic number whether they
have a .gz suffix or not.

now im really confused

[macemoneta]

This is a weekly process that creates a database used to respond to the "whatis" command. Whatis displays a brief description, taken from the man pages, for a command. For example:

$ whatis cron
cron (8) - daemon to execute scheduled commands (ISC Cron V4.1)

The man pages are stored in a compressed format, so makewhatis needs to expand them to get the description (which it does with zcat). Some packages don't follow that man formatting properly, or don't provide gzip'd man pages. When makewhatis does its processing every week, it will generate a few errors for these files.

If you find these occassional messages annoying, you can edit "/etc/cron.weekly/00-makewhatis.cron" and change:

makewhatis -w

to

makewhatis -w &>/dev/null

This will suppress any errors. If you never use the whatis command, you can simply erase the "/etc/cron.weekly/00-makewhatis.cron" file.