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'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")
@b0rk It was a bit of a toss-up for me. Sometimes I'll go straight to man, other times straight to generic google alternative. Man has the advantage of being right there - I don't even have to change my window focus - and while it can be very dense, there's a good chance I'll find an answer in the introduction or the examples at the end. But often it's simply too dense and I'm more interested in quickly solving the problem right in front of me than mastering a new tool, and then I'll open a browser and do a search.
The bad news for man pages though is that quality has definitely declined over the years. More modern packages are less likely to have a good man page, or sometimes don't have one at all. It's pretty obvious why, no sense complaining about it, but it can be annoying.
@uastronomer when you say "it's pretty obvious why" what do you mean?
(is it that with stack overflow & the internet generally it feels like there's less pressure to have good docs than when they were the only source of information?)
@b0rk Hmm. Not so obvious after all, now that you've made me think about it.
I mean that dev teams don't always have the resources or interest in supporting what they might see as "legacy" documentation, especially when they are already expected to put documentation on their website, in github, on discord, or wherever else their community hangs out. This wasn't an option in the old days, but now it is.
Julia Evans
Allen but one of the good ones