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Gems from the man page trenches (2016)

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Re: Gems from the man page trenches (2016)

#21

Post by Y_Y »

euroderf wrote: post #19

Didn't GNU man pages use to have a lot more examples in the 90s ? At some point (IIRC) examples were purged. A great disservice.

I don't remember what exactly happened, but a lot of manpages moved over to `info` and `man` would just complain and send you there.

These days I use `tldr` (via `tealdeer`) and that usually spits out a few nice example commands.

Re: Gems from the man page trenches (2016)

#22

Post by enriquto »

codeflo wrote: post #20
euroderf wrote: post #19

Didn't GNU man pages use to have a lot more examples in the 90s ? At some point (IIRC) examples were purged. A great disservice.

Was there a rationale?

"The GNU folks, in general, abhor man pages, and create info documents instead."

Re: Gems from the man page trenches (2016)

#23

Post by enriquto »

smcameron wrote: post #6

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.

> 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.

I agree.

And it's so easy to do! As long as your program has a --help option, creating the manpage simply amounts to calling help2man. Just add this to your makefile:

    foo.1 : foo ; help2man -N foo > foo.1

Re: Gems from the man page trenches (2016)

#25

Post by teddyh »

smcameron wrote: post #7
somat wrote: 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…

For those who are wondering: The Linux equivalent is “findsuper”, which is from the e2fsprogs package, but the “findsuper” command is not normally built and installed, so when you need it, you will have to download the e2fsprogs source and compile findsuper yourself. An unnecessary pain at the worst possible time, sadly.
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