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If you’re using a GNU system now you might be surprised by the quality of the BSD man pages, and documentation in general. Concise but still comprehensive, and
by sjmulder 8y ago
If you’re using a GNU system now you might be surprised by the quality of the BSD man pages, and documentation in general. Concise but still comprehensive, and plenty of examples. The tools (like man) aren’t really the problem here, the documentation itself is. (But it helps that the BSD folks show a bit more restraint wrt adding command line options.)
- tralarpa 8y agoI have just compared the man pages for Linux and FreeBSD, but the result is not really clear: Example provided on the FreeBSD man page of cut. Examples provided on the Linux man page of xargs. More examples provided on the Linux man page of find.
- sjmulder 8y agoI find the cut man page (looking at the OpenBSD one) very clear. It's just 62 lines (fits on a screen), has only 5 flags and the 2 examples clearly show how the tool is used. The xargs man page is ought to have some examples, I agree. The find manual is lengthy (as it has a bunch of options) but not excessively so and it also has a good bunch of examples. Edit: it also helps to be familiar with the pager, like using the search feature (hit / , n, n, Shift+n, ...) and the jump keys (G and g).