41–50 of 85 posts
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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?
It might be more helpful to write a Rust-based snark detector first.
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?
There's guaranteed to be some sort of context-sensitive man plugin for vim &| nvim for shell scripts. Also, have you ever seen the DOS Borland IDE context sensitive help UX?
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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
> 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.
I can't count the number of times that following the trail laid out by 'SEE ALSO' sections a step or three has lead me to the exact thing that I never knew I needed to be using. Chasing those sections down is almost always well worth the three to ten minutes spent.
And, like, if one is expecting a man page to cover in detail everything even vaguely related to what it documents, and one doesn't feel one has ten minutes to spend reading things that people thought were important to bring to your attention... well, I guess one could go ask an LLM to slop out some related words. That'll probably take less than ten minutes, though correctness is not at all guaranteed.
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man -k crontab is the real trick here. shows both sections so you don't have to already know the number exists.
It only shows a description though. 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,…
That's your hint to execute either 'man apropos' or 'man man'. Both tell you in detail what the flag and utility do.
You seem likely to be very disappointed in the '-h'/'-H' output of utilities from the BSD tradition. The output is often a list of all of the (almost always exclusively short) options presented as a sea of characters... and nothing else.
If you like man trivia (and why else would you be reading this?) you could check out the top comment at https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man... (discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27994194 )
Discovered this in college when I was shoulder surfing a coworker who always used the username Tyler. When he typed shutdown I called it out, and he said, "wait, it doesn't do that for you? I always assumed it said that for everyone and just replaced the username!".
(For those of you too young to know, it's a reference to an Aerosmith song)
If you like man trivia (and why else would you be reading this?) you could check out the top comment at https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man... (discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27994194 )
Reading this makes me wonder if Easter eggs are ever appropriate for something as ubiquitous as man.
They fell out of favor when people realized they were a security issue, because it was a code path that rarely got tested.
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I guess the joke is you can scale a file system or a fish, but can only tune a file system?
Tuna is a type of fish so the joke is that they sound the same.
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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.
> If man was designed by someone with any taste at all it would at least give you a menu [...] My goodness. Man was written on a paper teletype.
If you like man trivia (and why else would you be reading this?) you could check out the top comment at https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man... (discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27994194 )