Full text search for man pages

By using the command man man we can see that we have two options.

   -k     Equivalent to apropos.

   -K     Search  for  the  specified  string in *all* man pages. Warning:
          this is probably very slow!  It  helps  to  specify  a  section.
          (Just  to  give  a  rough idea, on my machine this takes about a
          minute per 500 man pages.)

This is on a RHEL 5 system

This is probably late. But I just completed my Google Summer of Code project for NetBSD and my task was exactly this. Implementing full text search for man pages.

The code is here: https://github.com/abhinav-upadhyay/apropos_replacement

Although at the moment this is for only *BSD (NetBSD to be precise but should work with other BSDs with some small adjustments) systems due to some assumptions made while writing the code and I don't have a Linux machine around me to fix or port this for working on Linux.

There is a web interface available for it at man-k.org