Thousands of keystrokes saved by not having to type “man syscall”… and millions of hours lost by confused folks like OP (and myself)
Luckily hours lost by the incompetent don't amount to much.
Needless obscurity is not a virtue
Number in man page titles e.g. sleep(3)
71–80 of 85 posts
Re: Number in man page titles e.g. sleep(3)
#72If 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 )
Another fun related one: If your username is Tyler and you run shutdown, instead of the usual message it will say "Oh, good morning Mr. Tyler, going down?" 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!…
This was removed years ago from sysvinit, for political reasons.
Re: Number in man page titles e.g. sleep(3)
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The point is they added another attack surface, however small, and another code path that should be tested. I dunno, "attack surface" to me means "facilitate opening/vulnerability somehow" and none of the easter egg code I've seen has done that. You have any concrete examples where a easter egg made possible a security vulnerability that wouldn't be possible otherwise? But yes, another code path created by easter e…
The most famous is the Xbox hack that was only possible because of an Easter Egg: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/144202/are-ther...
Microsoft code. The "hacker" went for the lower hanging fruit.
Re: Number in man page titles e.g. sleep(3)
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
... 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.
> Maybe we need a rewrite in Rust to fix that.
And maybe we need some versions: man version 1, man version 2 and so on. And of course, in the style of GTK, each one incompatible with all the others. Progress. /s
Re: Number in man page titles e.g. sleep(3)
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Programs these old are controlled by people who are very strongly opposed to change, even if it improves things. They like living in the 80s. I absolutely guarantee if you propose this change the the GNU neckbeards who control man they will come up with some bullshit technical reason why it can't be done.
> even if it improves things.
odds are, it doesn't.
Re: Number in man page titles e.g. sleep(3)
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
> Incidentally, man --help on my machine shows "-k, --apropos equivalent to apropos", which isn't very useful. 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 presente…
I mean, most of the -h/--help texts I've read are generally pretty good. Obviously not a full documentation for the program, but they tell you what the switches do. I wish there was a consensus on whether to use -h or --help though
Re: Number in man page titles e.g. sleep(3)
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Maybe they could update man files so that it lists crontab(file format) instead of crontab(5)? Whenever I've seen numbered man pages in the past, I thought it was just a page number in the manual for the program
Re: Number in man page titles e.g. sleep(3)
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Programs these old are controlled by people who are very strongly opposed to change, even if it improves things. They like living in the 80s. I absolutely guarantee if you propose this change the the GNU neckbeards who control man they will come up with some bullshit technical reason why it can't be done.
> even if it improves things. odds are, it doesn't.
Exactly the sort of response I would expect to this very clear improvement.
Re: Number in man page titles e.g. sleep(3)
#79Re: Number in man page titles e.g. sleep(3)
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There are a multitude of manpagers and viewers and frontends. It's one of those things you can write yourself very easily.
Any that have this feature? I did try batman but it only replaces the pager; not the man frontend which is where this change would need to happen.