3 ms·

I think the bash manual page (and others) intimidates people with its concise and (to the outsider) jargon. I often describe my bash book as an attempt to care

• teddyh 7y ago
  Instead of some proprietary book, I would suggest people read the classic Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide: http://tldp.org/guides.html#abs http://tldp.org/guides.html#abs Beginners might prefer the Bash Guide for Beginners: http://tldp.org/guides.html#bbg http://tldp.org/guides.html#bbg The Bash manual page is concise because it is a Unix manual page. Unix manual pages are supposed to be concise, because they are meant to be reference documents, not tutorials. In the GNU project, this is what the Info documentation is for. However, the bash project has elected not to maintain such a document, so the above documents from TLDP (The Linux Documentation Project) are the next best thing.
  • dredmorbius 7y ago
    That said, drop everything and get you some Jerry Peek; https://www.worldcat.org/title/from-bash-to-zshell-conquering-the-command-line/oclc/939074559&referer=brief_results https://www.worldcat.org/title/from-bash-to-zshell-conquerin... https://www.worldcat.org/title/learning-the-unix-operating-system-a-concise-guide-for-the-new-user/oclc/847931076&referer=brief_results https://www.worldcat.org/title/learning-the-unix-operating-s...
• Sharlin 7y ago
  The bash man page is simply way too long, and IMHO not organized very clearly. And man pages don't even have a table of contents, never mind hyperlinks. The info version is naturally better in those respects, though.