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You can scroll through /bin, /usr/bin/ and /usr/local/bin/ and find all the included basic tools and then read "man 'tool'" or google for it
by sureaboutthis 9y ago
You can scroll through /bin, /usr/bin/ and /usr/local/bin/ and find all the included basic tools and then read "man 'tool'" or google for it
- linkmotif 9y agoThis is not practically useful advice.
- provost 9y agoYes, it is practically useful advice, especially when you’re on a flight with no WiFi.
- linkmotif 9y agoThat’s a good use case. Believe me I’m into man pages. Every 6 months I check the Apple store to see if anyone has created a good man pages app. But as primary learning material for most people: not so sure.
- Symbiote 9y agoIt's how I learned, back in dial-up days. Coreutils is a good place to start. http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/coreutils.html http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/coreutils.html
- linkmotif 9y agoI’m not saying you can’t learn this way. I’m saying it’s not practical for most people. Many people who would fail this way would succeed other ways. Reading man bash as primary learning material will lead to failure for 999/1000 humans.
- ComputerGuru 9y agoThat just means the man page you're using sucks.
- linkmotif 9y agoI’ve wanted to read man bash, and believe me, I’d think I was the kind of person who would (I learned Go just reading the spec. It’s a great spec), but man bash and many other man pages have never worked for me. Maybe if I tried again now.
- scbrg 9y agobash, incidentally, has a man page that sucks. I've found that most larger GNU projects have pretty horrible man pages. Probably due to feature creep in said projects - so the manuals have to be large to cover all the features. I spent 10 years avoiding awk, because every time I typed 'man awk' I was overwhelmed by the GNU monstrosity. Then I found the man page for the plan9 implementation of awk (http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/1/awk http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/1/awk) and learned the language in fifteen minutes.
- jolmg 9y ago> I've found that most larger GNU projects have pretty horrible man pages. Probably due to feature creep in said projects - so the manuals have to be large to cover all the features. Rather, info manuals are GNU's official (self-invented I think) documentation system. They make manpages only because of their popularity, but they direct you to the info pages for more info. When other projects have too much documentation for a manpage, they split it among several pages, like perl, openssl, zsh, git, borg, btrfs, etc. Personally, I like both, and wouldn't rank one above the other.
- KC8ZKF 9y agoTry 'info bash', it's a lot easier to browse. 'info' by itself gives you a menu of installed info documentation. 'C-h i' in Emacs.
- sureaboutthis 9y agoIt's far better than Googling or guessing for them. Looking in those places provides exactly what is on your system and the man pages exactly describe what they are for. If there is a better source, I don't know it.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jeremiep 9y agoThat's how I learned a lot of things; by literally scanning through everything it had to offer and googling what I didn't understand. I did that for linux utils, language references, most programs I use and most codebases I had to work on. One notable example is the time I had to learn C# 4 years ago. It took an entire morning to scan through the entire language reference and then later I found out I already knew a lot more than "advanced" devs who would just look up stuff as they needed it, without knowing what actually is available in the first place. I feel its the only sensible advice if you want to learn a lot on your own with limited time.
- gm-conspiracy 9y agoI never thought of that, and said to myself, "Hmmm... that is a good idea."
- justinsaccount 9y agoThat is exactly how I learned how things worked.
- kjs3 9y agoHow so? It's how essentially everyone used to do it.