Mastodawn

🤣 Oh, joy! Yet another groundbreaking revelation: people like *examples* in man pages. Who could have guessed? 🚀 Thank goodness someone finally added the most *basic* #examples to #tcpdump and #dig... because, you know, reading is hard. 📚🔍
https://jvns.ca/blog/2026/03/10/examples-for-the-tcpdump-and-dig-man-pages/ #manpages #programming #humor #HackerNews #ngated

Examples for the tcpdump and dig man pages

Julia Evans

Hacker News 3d ago

Examples for the tcpdump and dig man pages

https://jvns.ca/blog/2026/03/10/examples-for-the-tcpdump-and-dig-man-pages/

#HackerNews #tcpdump #dig #manpages #networking #examples #techblog

Examples for the tcpdump and dig man pages

Julia Evans

Mr Taps Mar 7

Do you want to write manpages but the strange manpage language is just too much? All mysterious looking ".Op Fl v Pf = Ar baz", whatever that means? This is your moment: lowdown v3.0.0, just released, has support to properly convert manpage-like Markdown to idiomatic mdoc.7 and man.7 output. It's described in https://kristaps.bsd.lv/lowdown/mdoc.html. Focus on your code, and let lowdown handle the docs. Full link: https://kristaps.bsd.lv/lowdown

(Salacious intro aside, this has been a long piece of development; and yes, it makes me a little sad, because mdoc.7 is a format I enjoy. But let's face it: sticking to mdoc.7 (or worse, man.7) is a losing battle. We can do better!) #unix #manpages

Lowdown Manpage Support

adingbatponder

👾Feb 22

Seems command-line interface tools #cli with good #manpages / help info are very powerful because automatic coding tools can easily interface with them & use them correctly, even without additional context. Interestingly, many machine-based coding assistants are extremely good at generating command-line oriented programs in the first place. Until now, I struggled to build solid GUIs, for example with #ratatui. Keeping software using the CLI - as well - seems to provide big automation advantages.

रञ्जित (Ranjit Mathew)Feb 21

💯!

“Notes On Clarifying Man Pages”, Julia Evans (https://jvns.ca/blog/2026/02/18/man-pages/).

On HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065972

On Lobsters: https://lobste.rs/s/zpifkh/notes_on_clarifying_man_pages

#Unix #Linux #Manuals #ManPages #Documentation #Learning

Notes on clarifying man pages

Julia Evans

Show thread

Graham Perrin Feb 14

<https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#style> mentions the one-sentence-per-line rule for manual pages, however:

a) there's no such rule in mdoc(7) <https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=mdoc&sektion=7&manpath=freebsd-current> or style.mdoc(5) <https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=style.mdoc&sektion=5&manpath=freebsd-current>; and

b) I frequently see multiple lines for a single sentence – is this simply because authors and reviewers happily ignore a rule?

A random pick, from a very recently changed page:

<https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/f2c2e5b0bf9def01b10651b9802fa38d07d9d265/share/man/man4/multicast.4#L163-L166>

– the longest line is 78 characters.

FreeBSD style aside, Debian man-pages(7) suggests a source code line length of no more than about 75 characters wherever possible: <https://manpages.debian.org/trixie/manpages/man-pages.7.en.html#Conventions_for_source_file_layout>.

#FreeBSD #documentation #manpages

freebsd-src/CONTRIBUTING.md at main · freebsd/freebsd-src

The FreeBSD src tree publish-only repository. Experimenting with 'simple' pull requests.... - freebsd/freebsd-src

GitHub

Tommi Nieminen Feb 6

Käyttääköhän kekään enää #Texinfo'a? Siis ainakaan alkuperäiseen tarkoitukseensa #man-sivuja laajempana järjestelmän ohjeistuksena? Enää #Debian'kaan ei tunnu asentavan infoa oletuksena, vaikka nimenomaan #GNU'n ohjelmissa joskus man-sivu on tynkä ja varsinainen tieto info-sivulla. #floss #linux #unix #manpages #infopages

Leaf Jan 29

I think I've finished setting up my "new" laptop! It's a Panasonic CF-XZ (6, I think!) with an old i5 and a whopping 8GB ram. It's now running #Fedora with #XFCE desktop. I've chosen #Catppuccin Frappe for all my theming choices and I just did a quick exercise from Modern C by Jens Gustedt (who, I just found out is on Mastadon!

). Also, maybe my favourite thing after having to deal with WSL and also trying to program on the steam deck, #ManPages work!!!!

cactusdualcore Jan 27

A great read for anybody interested in documentation on *nix systems

http://www.schemamania.org/troff/for-the-love-of-troff.pdf

#unix #troff #manpages #documentation #softwaredevelopment

adingbatponder

👾Jan 15

@zer0unplanned This post looks very useful. I made a similar tool (still in beta with errors) to grab screenshots and raw data of manual pages #manpages for #linux commands, in this case #ssh info, and to present the different layers that are the OS, app and nixos settings. The program ssh-key-manager is in my flake https://repoducible.org ( features/security/packages #flake #part can be pulled out into another flake) & bit of a monster. Yours looks ultra compact #nixos
#flakepart #flakeparts