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Gems from the man page trenches (2016)

saminiir.com

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Re: Gems from the man page trenches (2016)

#11
post #4

My favorite man page is scan_ffs. http://man.openbsd.org/scan_ffs The basic operation of this program is as follows: 1. Panic. You usually do so anyways, so you might as well get it over with. Just don't do anything stupid. Panic away from your machine. Then relax, and see if the steps below won't help you out.

Ha. I wasn't familiar with scan_ffs, so I googled it. Given what it does, or purports to do, yeah, a first step of "Panic" makes total sense. Reminds me of something which happened early in my career. An older, wiser coworker came by and said, "You won't believe what I almost did. I was installing a new disk on cyclops (our main NFS server), and I almost typed 'newfs /dev/sda' instead of 'newfs /dev/sdb'" (this was o…

> so I googled it

uh... the man page? XD

Re: Gems from the man page trenches (2016)

#15
> They are almost without exception well-written and concise, and the intuition you gain for particular topics as you browse through the man pages is well worth the effort. In contrast, many developers shoot straight to googling the answer for the problem at hand.

Maybe worth the effort if you want to learn about a program in detail, but in practice I often give up reading the manual and use google instead because I just want to know/remind myself the most common use cases. To be fair, there are some man pages that have a great USAGE or EXAMPLES section which meet this purpose.

Re: Gems from the man page trenches (2016)

#18

If you create and distribute an executable for linux/unix, and you don't create a man page for it, you are committing a crime against humanity.

And pandoc makes it easy: https://eddieantonio.ca/blog/2015/12/18/authoring-manpages-i...

Huh, I wonder how close that is to what `ronn` does (also markdown to man, via a couple of paths, written in ruby.)
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