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> It's unfortunate that people no longer dive into original system/program documentation, but google/ask for quick answer. I've been thinking about this myself

> It's unfortunate that people no longer dive into original system/program documentation, but google/ask for quick answer. I've been thinking about this myself. I think there's good reason: Google (or a bunch of experts on hand) will often provide a better, more concise answer to your specific question than having to search and grok the manpages. As extreme examples, I regularly ragequit the Bash manpage after trying to find the meaning of some keywords, and the Sudoers manpage is notorious with presenting the syntax as EBNF without examples! (a pity GNU Info never fixed their interface, the idea's good)

lambda 13y ago
For bash keywords, don't look in the man page, try "help <word>". The Bash man page does not contain a complete description of Bash, only a brief summary. "man <builtin>" provides a generic builtins page usually, since the builtins can vary between shells so one man page can't cover all of the different shell behaviors. However, bash has a "help" command which will give you the bash-specific description of a given builtin. Other than that, I usually find the HTML Bash documentation easier to read and navigate than the info, so I just use that instead. And yes, the sudoers man page is pure evil.
- JetSpiegel 13y ago
  After ragequitting the builtins manpage, created a hack/bash script that checks the type of the command and alternates between manpage, help <cmd> or alias.
contingencies 13y ago
What was that quote again? Let me google that for you. Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759 Trading long term independence for temporary efficiency never looked so good!
vacri 13y ago
My pet hate is man pages for things with lots of options, where the options are neither semantically nor alphabetically grouped (eg rsync list-o-options). Second to that is the 'example' where every single option possible is given, while at the same time not having a typical usage example. When there's 50 potential flags with arguments, I lose track of how to structure the command - it's somewhere in all those square brackets... somewhere...

lambda 13y ago

For bash keywords, don't look in the man page, try "help <word>". The Bash man page does not contain a complete description of Bash, only a brief summary. "man <builtin>" provides a generic builtins page usually, since the builtins can vary between shells so one man page can't cover all of the different shell behaviors. However, bash has a "help" command which will give you the bash-specific description of a given builtin. Other than that, I usually find the HTML Bash documentation easier to read and navigate than the info, so I just use that instead. And yes, the sudoers man page is pure evil.

JetSpiegel 13y ago
After ragequitting the builtins manpage, created a hack/bash script that checks the type of the command and alternates between manpage, help <cmd> or alias.

contingencies 13y ago

What was that quote again? Let me google that for you. Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759 Trading long term independence for temporary efficiency never looked so good!

vacri 13y ago

My pet hate is man pages for things with lots of options, where the options are neither semantically nor alphabetically grouped (eg rsync list-o-options). Second to that is the 'example' where every single option possible is given, while at the same time not having a typical usage example. When there's 50 potential flags with arguments, I lose track of how to structure the command - it's somewhere in all those square brackets... somewhere...