Maybe they were good thirty years ago when you were supposed to have a printed 3000-page UNIX manual with you and the man pages served just as a reminder ot the basic things of that manual.
But today, in 2018, they are just unusable for a begginer. If you are a begginer, you will not understand a word of most of them, and if you are an advanced user, they will not tell you anything you don't already know. They are useless.
My problem with them is that they have way too much shit and I always just need to know something specific Quicker to google instead of searching through the manpage
Easton Clark
They are pretty useful, you are just luser not needing to learn to do advanced things, and many such are documented in man pages. PS there are more than just section 1 and 8 in man.
Matthew Long
ctrl+shift+f is your friend baguette
Daniel Smith
They are reference manuals, not tutorials. Personally, I love them, as they are very quick to access and just searching through them usually yields what I want to know.
Elijah Mitchell
So you're saying we should adopt womyn pages.
Justin Rogers
Agreed. Archwiki helped me far more than any manpages
Xavier Mitchell
I think emacs offers that
Owen Watson
i just google shit i cant be bothered with man pages
Easton Rogers
if you don't understand man pages then just read the man page on them
Aiden Ramirez
This.
Grayson Martin
man man
Luke Powell
i really wish that every program came with tldr pages as well
Not my fault if someone is extremely retarded and doesn't know how or what to read. Man pages are not disappointing me to this day. >but muh stackoverflow!! And off Jow Forums you go
Henry Baker
It does not matter which tools you use. The only thing that matters is that you get your shit done.
For some people man pages work, for others it's the arch wiki or whatever. It. does. not. matter. Pick your tools and know them. Don't care about what other people say.
Nevertheless man-pages in general include all needed information. Sure, it is lacking examples, but once you figure out how they work and how they are structured it's fine and if you don't want to figure it out, then just don't. But stop complaining.
If it works and it helped someone getting familiar with a new command to get started, I say mission accomplished. And it's available in many formats.
Brayden Taylor
>project has a README.md >lazy programmer makes --help just vomit the README.md into the terminal >make a nice pretty man page to print to terminal instead that's easier to read because it's formatted for small screens >project maintainer doesn't like it because it puts information in two separate places >goes back to just vomiting the ugly README.md to the terminal
>retard doesn't know you can search manpages >retard doesn't know you can pass --help flag to get "something specific"
Jack Parker
>cheat.sh You have to be online for it all the time?
Robert Harris
ZOOMER FUCK OFF
Jaxon Barnes
Eh, I think that is how curl works user.
Joshua Roberts
I'm surprised people hate manpages because they're too much.
I think they aren't enough. Yeah ok so I have 20 switches, what will they literally do, and can I combine certain onrs without them breaking something oe tripping each other?
It's the problem I have with alot of documentation, yeah there is this nd that and I can use that parameter but what does it DO? It seems like I check stackoverflow way too many times for things that could be in a man or other documentation.
I am going to be fucking on top of my own documentation to fight this cancer.
Ethan Turner
You can if you put colors on less.
Andrew Bailey
they are like the msdn of linux, there could be 5 pages of useless shit and then in one little short sentence is something ultra important and if you miss it, you're fucked. old people act like this is okay only because they had to read that shit for years and years and they are arrogant enough to assume that I'd get paid to do the same but that's not true anymore.
Juan Parker
Next level autist: reads man pages for fun.
Jose Martinez
>he doesn't know about the one man page a day challenge
Never gonna make it, brah
Alexander Carter
How to do that?
Angel Reed
Edit your .bashrc file and put this on it:
# Have less display colours export LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$'\E[01;31m' export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\E[01;31m' export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\E[0m' export LESS_TERMCAP_se=$'\E[0m' export LESS_TERMCAP_so=$'\E[01;44;33m' export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\E[0m' export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\E[01;32m'
>2018 >something called "man" thats so mysoginistic wtf
Charles King
I do find man pages kind of my last resort. I'd prefer them to contain more examples of common usages. Some do, but it's not guaranteed.
Liam Allen
Let's be honest: OP is a faggot and his taste is questionable
Grayson Wilson
>if you are an advanced user, they will not tell you anything you don't already know They're for reference.
Isaac Phillips
man pages are much better than a shit google search the problem is zoomers have zero attention span and will thankfully never get good tech jobs. I guarantee you're a bootcamp webdev.
k y s p l z
Brandon Myers
literally `man whathever; /mysearch; q` instead of opening up your botnet browser and searching for minutes to hours
Christian Cooper
No they're not. They're extremely useful. They work perfectly fine for most things. You're probably to retarded to realise man is also used for code/library manuals and system calls among other things.
I use manpages all the time, maybe you're just a brainlet?
Nathaniel Baker
>If you are a begginer, you will not understand a word of most of them, Then you wouldn't even know which man page to read to begin with.
>if you are an advanced user, they will not tell you anything you don't already know. As if anyone would know all the optional parameters to each and every program.
Generally, if your question is "How do I do A" man pages aren't that helpful, but if your question is "Can I do A with program B" they are great.
Hudson Bailey
Wow, you're so right! They should make it easy so us girls can use Linux too! Why not make it a wiki I can access from my phone that explains it using a multiracial inclusive assortment of emojis??
Adrian Green
Annual reminder that man can spit out postscript man -t 1 intro > out.ps
Thomas Wood
I agree that man pages are not useful for beginners. Fortunately, the FreeBSD Handbook exists to teach you everything you need to know so you can understand man pages later. Don't blame man pages for the fact your GNU/Linux distros don't have good beginner docs. It's getting better now, but a few years ago, if the BSDs didn't exist, I'd have never learnt Unix.
Cooper Gutierrez
But why? Postscript is garbage and all the postscript readers are garbage. It's just a proprietary Adobe format people keep shilling. I'd rather read it in plaintext or even in html.
Camden Morales
>app Off yourself
Michael Phillips
I dunno. Maybe some people really hate trees, and want to print the whole thing.
Alexander Peterson
kek
Oliver Powell
>project knows how to handle documentation flow >i don't like it too bad user
Samuel Murphy
There is an amazing lack of good documentation. Maybe it is just a coincidence that the same people that write manpages are shit at writing documentation. Maybe the original manpage docs were shit and they learned from that. /thread