Mastodawn

when do you usually use the man page for a complex command line tool to answer a question you have? (like git, openssl, rsync, curl, etc)

(edit: no need to say "i use --help then man")

I’d look there first

57.6%

Only after trying other options first

33.2%

Never

6.4%

Other / not sure

2.8%

Poll ended at Feb 21 at 4:10pm.

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Julia Evans Feb 20

i'm very curious about everyone who says "I'd look there first", if I want to figure out how to do something new I think I'll usually google how to do it rather than look at the man page, and then maybe later look at the man page to look up the details

(I've gotten enough of these answers:
- "I like that man pages don't require changing context"
- "with the man page I know I have the right version of the docs")

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Ingvar Feb 20

@b0rk For me, it is avery very old habit. When I started out poking at Unix systems, if I wanted to "get information from outside the computer I was on", I could, if I was lucky, turn my head and ask someone else in the same room.

Otherwise, I would have to fire up a newsreader, post to UseNet, wait for the UUCP spool to empty (over a modem), wait for the reply to be written, then wait for the relevant article to trickle back in a later UUCP update batch.

I will, frequently, after having opened the man page, start a web search pretty soon after, because many man pages are badly written (and I must say that good technical writing is a skill that doesn't necessarily correlate with "ability to write code").

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Mx. Eddie R

@vatine @b0rk
Yup, same. My first laptop ran qnx 4 and came with the man pages on paper (it was something like 1.5 shelf-metres of very nicely bound softcover books), and I was coming from MS-DOS and Win 3.1. I spent a lot of time poring over those manuals to learn even the most basic stuff like "how to 'dir'" and "how to quit elvis".