Show HN: manpages-tldr – short manpages with examples

I'm not sure I follow your question. A man file contains a single manpage. My 'find' command explicitly specified objects of type file rather than symlinks to avoid double-counting manfiles with multiple symlinks (I find 2527 symlinks under /usr/share/man/man). That excludes hard links -- turns out that agetty.8 and getty.8 are hard linked:

    $ find man* -type f ! -links 1
    man8/agetty.8.gz
    man8/getty.8.gz

Mind if I ask what OS you're running? How many installed packages? And have you de-duplicated the manpages?

I think it is very unlikely that the average person would file a bug report for documentation.

I've filed such bugs. It's difficult to search across all packages, but there are a few filed for bash under Debian:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?include=subject...

Re: different manpage section have different statistics: Well, yes. As I said, YMMV, however the mean is still generally within 1-2 pages of the 4-page mean I'd first described.

Note that nowhere did I say that all manpages have EXAMPLE sections. Many (most?) don't. Hrm ...

Of 3066 manpages in man1, I find 519 contain lines beginning with "EXAMPLE" in formatted output. That's roughly 17%.

My bigger point is that addressing this deficiency rather than creating de novo documentation projects would be highly preferable. Much less glory, sadly.

"man page" == a given 'Nix feature's manual entry. I've tried to use "manpage" where this is being presented.

"Pages" without the "man" modifier indicates the number of printed pages produced (defaulting to one page per 56 lines of output using 'pr'). The page count is actually reduced somewhat when printing postscript: 72 vs. 98 pages for bash(1).

While you can search manpages with apropos or man -k...

Again: this is where tools such as Debian's dwww (also available on Debian derivatives such as Ubuntu) come in very handy: the manpages are presented as Web pages on the localhost webserver, and with an installed search engine ("swish++"), the full text of all documentation is indexed.

And just to be clear: Debian provides copious amounts of documentation packages: manpages, info pages, the Linux Documentation Project (in HTML or ASCII text: doc-linux-html / doc-linux-text), RFCs, and multiple guides and such. With dwww, all of this is presented locally as web documents, indexed, and searchable. Seems there's little reason Wikipedia couldn't be included as well, though you'd want to sync that regularly.