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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Sebastian Hagedorn

@vatine @b0rk I feel you, with a twist: The first UNIX System I used was a Siemens SINIX machine at the university hospital, and it came with many, many volumes of printed out man pages! I was tasked with administering the machine as a Zivildienstleistender, because nobody else was around anymore who could do it ...
So I spent the first month just reading all the man pages and trying out commands.