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bash, 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 pr
by scbrg 9y ago
bash, 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.