> 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 presented as a sea of characters... and nothing else.

Hell, you don't even have to have a handle on what the section numbers mean for these things to be useful. The appearance of something in a "SEE ALSO" section indicates that the manual page author thought that that thing was both related to the thing being documented and worth reading if the current man page didn't answer all of your questions.

I can't count the number of times that following the trail laid out by 'SEE ALSO' sections a step or three has lead me to the exact thing that I never knew I needed to be using. Chasing those sections down is almost always well worth the three to ten minutes spent.

And, like, if one is expecting a man page to cover in detail everything even vaguely related to what it documents, and one doesn't feel one has ten minutes to spend reading things that people thought were important to bring to your attention... well, I guess one could go ask an LLM to slop out some related words. That'll probably take less than ten minutes, though correctness is not at all guaranteed.

> Lena is no longer used as a test image because it's porn.

The Lenna test image can be seen over the text "Click above for the original as a TIFF image." at [0]. If you consider that to be porn, then I find your opinion on what is and is not porn to be worthless.

The test image is a cropped portion of porn, but if a safe-for-work image would be porn but for what you can't see in the image, then any picture of any human ever is porn as we're all nude under our clothes.

For additional commentary (published in 1996) on the history and controversy about the image, see [1].

[0] <http://www.lenna.org/>

[1] <https://web.archive.org/web/20010414202400/http://www.nofile...>

Ah, I see what you're driving at.

It's a security feature in the same way that a power-cut switch is a security feature. A power-cut switch's purpose is cut power to a machine so that it can -say- be safely worked on or relocated (or simply to not draw power when the machine's not in use), the machine also happens to be inaccessible while its power is cut.

Sure. It's not technically a lie to call a power-cut switch a security feature for most pieces of kit. I'd still laugh at the salesman that made the assertion. If I were feeling particularly cunty, I'd ask him if he injured himself from that great big stretch.

> At some point you're going to have to find a way to argue that the Cisco PIX was not a security device...

What? It's a firewall that can do NAT. The PIX is clearly a security device. NAT is clearly an address-depletion-mitigation technique.

> Since there's no way for anyone on the Internet to know which machine on the corporate network is using a Class C address at any given time, it's impossible to establish a telnet or FTP session with any particular device.

Right. And you can achieve the exact same effect with a firewall on an edge router or on a host. I get that firewalls might have been much less common thirty-ish years ago and that doing packet filtering might have been pretty novel for many, leading folks to get confused when they encountered a combination firewall+NAT device.

> Your own sources confirm what I'm saying.

I don't see where they do. I see them talking almost exclusively about working around address depletion.

Hell, look at Cisco's press release for its acquisition of Network Translation, Inc. [0] It's all about address depletion and resource efficiency; security is mentioned as an afterthought. I'll quote the relevant paragraphs (and leave in the line break mangling present in the original).