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On 5 Feb 2009, at 23:03, Saphirus Sage wrote: |
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>> ... |
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>> Man pages are notoriously bad. The gentoo handbook and other official |
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>> docs are great OTOH. |
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>> |
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> |
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> Man pages notoriously bad?! Now that's a stance I can hardly |
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> understand, |
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> they've always been a godsend in my experience! Just practice using a |
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> command a few times, look through the options and learn it in the |
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> period |
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> of ten minutes, and a man page has done its purpose. If this stance is |
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> due to your own inadequate ability to read technical documents, then |
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> do |
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> not apply the lacking to anything but your own capacity for |
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> comprehension. |
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To be fair there is an "art" to reading manpages. |
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Manpages tend to be terse yet authoritative, but it was only after |
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(perhaps) a couple of years of using Unix (and perhaps longer) that I |
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learned to appreciate them. |
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I think manpages tend to assume that the reader is already proficient |
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with Unix and often that the reader is familiar with regular |
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expressions. They tend to use the academic language of computer |
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science which may be completely baffling to someone who is technically |
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& logically very competent but self-taught. |
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My experience is that only after learning the syntax of manpages (is |
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that itself documented?) do I find most of them tremendously easy to |
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navigate to find the one specific option I'm looking for. |
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Stroller. |
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