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My favorite piece of man trivia is from the source of the tunefs BSD man page, which contains: .\" Take this out and a Unix Daemon will dog your steps from now until .\" the time_t's wrap around. .Pp You can tune a file system, but you cannot tune a fish. https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/main/sbin/tunefs...
I guess the joke is you can scale a file system or a fish, but can only tune a file system?
Confession. I think I haven't read manpages since stackoverflow and certainly not since LLMs. Perhaps the modern version of "man" should be a program you can talk to.
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... because if you do `man crontab` you get section 1, which does not document the crontab fields.
man -k crontab is the real trick here. shows both sections so you don't have to already know the number exists.
Incidentally, man --help on my machine shows "-k, --apropos equivalent to apropos", which isn't very useful. I know the two are equivalent, because they're on the same line of switches, what does it actually do?
With some further man digging, apropos is actually a separate program that looks through man page names/descriptions for the argument. Unless you run it with no arguments, in which case it just outputs "apropos what?" Instead of an actual error message like "No search term provided" or something
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That is incredibly stupid. A documentation system designed by someone who doesn't understand how people use documentation. If man was designed by someone with any taste at all it would at least give you a menu to select (1) crontab command, (5) crontab file format. Maybe we need a rewrite in Rust to fix that.
Or a minor alteration to an existing program to support a good suggestion. Why is it that the Rust community thinks that the solution to every flaw in an application is a rewrite in Rust?
For me man(3) is the most interesting of them all. Run `apropos . | grep "(3)"`; you'll be surprised how many libraries come with man pages for their functions (e.g; curl). Now I wonder if there are any IDEs that can automatically dial into these man pages and pull up documentation for functions?
Also, have you ever seen the DOS Borland IDE context sensitive help UX?
I looked up what the numbers mean a couple of times, but always forget it immediately
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... because if you do `man crontab` you get section 1, which does not document the crontab fields.
That is incredibly stupid. A documentation system designed by someone who doesn't understand how people use documentation. If man was designed by someone with any taste at all it would at least give you a menu to select (1) crontab command, (5) crontab file format. Maybe we need a rewrite in Rust to fix that.
Confession. I think I haven't read manpages since stackoverflow and certainly not since LLMs. Perhaps the modern version of "man" should be a program you can talk to.
That may "answer" a specific question. And all llms can do as they include manpages in training data (and any Agentic thing can search) however the value in reading documentation is that one can find different angles by learning about different options, which allow tontackle problems from a different perspective. The answer to a question is constrained by assumptions which are part of the question.
My favorite piece of man trivia is from the source of the tunefs BSD man page, which contains: .\" Take this out and a Unix Daemon will dog your steps from now until .\" the time_t's wrap around. .Pp You can tune a file system, but you cannot tune a fish. https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/main/sbin/tunefs...
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... because if you do `man crontab` you get section 1, which does not document the crontab fields.
In fact, the only reference to crontab(5) is in the SEE ALSO section (on my version anyway), but that doesn't say why you might want to see crontab(5), just that it exists. That is spectacularly useless
Depends. If one is aware of the meaning of section numbers, that "(5)" is very obviously suggesting that there is a file format named "crontab" which is documented. It's also pretty reasonable to suppose that the command and the file format of the same name are related.
A novice might miss the convention and the connection. Man pages are not quite novice material.