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I strongly disagree on this one too. That's the first place I look for help and it annoys me to no end when a CLI program that doesn't come with one. I stoppe

by kolme 8y ago

I strongly disagree on this one too. That's the first place I look for help and it annoys me to no end when a CLI program that doesn't come with one. I stopped taking seriously the article at that point and quickly skimmed through the rest of it. Man pages are a great unix culture heritage, please new developers don't give up on them!

davidhcefx 8y ago
I myself also love reading man pages, but speaking of compatibility, I have to say that “--help” is a more universal way of showing help pages. Of course it’s better to have both of them though.
- larkeith 8y ago
  --help is fine, but almost never a substitute for a full man page, except for the most trivial of applications (unless your --help is as complete as a man page, in which case... good on you for providing full documentation, but I'll hate you a bit every time I unthinkingly drop two hundred lines of text in my terminal.)
  - smarinov 8y ago
    Unless it just opens the man page if it is so long. Like git.
- JdeBP 8y ago
  I strongly suspect that --help is on the contrary less universal, given that there exist entire toolsets lacking the --help convention but having manual pages. There was almost a quarter of a century's worth of Unix tools that developed before --help was invented. * https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/416796/5132 https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/416796/5132 * https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/207136/ https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/207136/
  - dickeytk 8y ago
    How can you say it's less universal when it doesn't work on windows?
larkeith 8y ago
Moreover, man pages serve as an essential resource that is much more reliably available than any other - when my network's routing packets in circles, the database server's on fire, and the duplicate has repeated the last transaction on every record, I don't care how "most users" don't use man pages or that web documentation is much more Google-able; I care that I have access to complete, detailed information (not the abbreviated version provided by --help) on all the utilities available to me; I care that apropos can help me recall the names of utilities I don't remember (something the article does not address); I care that I don't have to worry about having access to documentation, in addition to everything else, because it's all in a single, standardized, effective repository of man pages. I really can't express strongly enough how much I disagree with the view that man pages are no longer relevant or necessary.

by kolme 8y ago

davidhcefx 8y ago

I myself also love reading man pages, but speaking of compatibility, I have to say that “--help” is a more universal way of showing help pages. Of course it’s better to have both of them though.

larkeith 8y ago
--help is fine, but almost never a substitute for a full man page, except for the most trivial of applications (unless your --help is as complete as a man page, in which case... good on you for providing full documentation, but I'll hate you a bit every time I unthinkingly drop two hundred lines of text in my terminal.)
- smarinov 8y ago
  Unless it just opens the man page if it is so long. Like git.
JdeBP 8y ago
I strongly suspect that --help is on the contrary less universal, given that there exist entire toolsets lacking the --help convention but having manual pages. There was almost a quarter of a century's worth of Unix tools that developed before --help was invented. * https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/416796/5132 https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/416796/5132 * https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/207136/ https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/207136/
- dickeytk 8y ago
  How can you say it's less universal when it doesn't work on windows?

larkeith 8y ago

Moreover, man pages serve as an essential resource that is much more reliably available than any other - when my network's routing packets in circles, the database server's on fire, and the duplicate has repeated the last transaction on every record, I don't care how "most users" don't use man pages or that web documentation is much more Google-able; I care that I have access to complete, detailed information (not the abbreviated version provided by --help) on all the utilities available to me; I care that apropos can help me recall the names of utilities I don't remember (something the article does not address); I care that I don't have to worry about having access to documentation, in addition to everything else, because it's all in a single, standardized, effective repository of man pages. I really can't express strongly enough how much I disagree with the view that man pages are no longer relevant or necessary.