do you have a favourite man page?
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@d6 this is so cool, I've never looked at this before! makes me want to find out who wrote them.
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do you have a favourite man page? thinking of writing a short blog post exploring man pages and what makes a good one and I'd love some more examples
my contribution: I think it's cool that `man curl` includes an example for every single option
@b0rk `man man` flashed me recently
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do you have a favourite man page? thinking of writing a short blog post exploring man pages and what makes a good one and I'd love some more examples
my contribution: I think it's cool that `man curl` includes an example for every single option
@b0rk I'm not sure, if I measure it by times I read it, it should be tar, but because of its number of options. Regarding the fun of reading it or the fact I'm confident I will find the information I need, none really qualify
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do you have a favourite man page? thinking of writing a short blog post exploring man pages and what makes a good one and I'd love some more examples
my contribution: I think it's cool that `man curl` includes an example for every single option
@b0rk I've always thought the jq man page is quite good. Lots of good examples
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@thatandromeda I have a hard time with them too, that's why I've been thinking about this
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do you have a favourite man page? thinking of writing a short blog post exploring man pages and what makes a good one and I'd love some more examples
my contribution: I think it's cool that `man curl` includes an example for every single option
@b0rk
I like section 7 in general - it can provide a good overview and tie together many different manpages relevant to a single topic that'd otherwise be hard to track down.If I have to pick one, I guess it's
capabilities(7) -
@b0rk @thatandromeda Often I pipe the output of `man` into `less`, then try to search for something like -n, which returns way too many results (e.g. mentions of that option before its definition). I wonder if a better `man` could be made that would let me search through an *index* of options instead of doing a full-text search.
@benjamingeer @b0rk @thatandromeda What improved my experience greatly was configuring neovim as man page viewer.
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do you have a favourite man page? thinking of writing a short blog post exploring man pages and what makes a good one and I'd love some more examples
my contribution: I think it's cool that `man curl` includes an example for every single option
@b0rk I was particularly surprised and happy seeing a code example in xscreensaver-command man page [1], which showcases the way it (xscreensaver-command -watch) can be integrated into the system doing some dynamic stuff.
Despite it's Perl, which I can barely read, but it looked like a really nice addition.
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@b0rk I was particularly surprised and happy seeing a code example in xscreensaver-command man page [1], which showcases the way it (xscreensaver-command -watch) can be integrated into the system doing some dynamic stuff.
Despite it's Perl, which I can barely read, but it looked like a really nice addition.
@b0rk also, man ascii [1]. While being in misc category, puts the most important information into few different tables and a list. For more convenient exploration and search, in oct, hex, dec, and char representation. Which... fits everything in a single screen.
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do you have a favourite man page? thinking of writing a short blog post exploring man pages and what makes a good one and I'd love some more examples
my contribution: I think it's cool that `man curl` includes an example for every single option
@b0rk Such a great page to point out. We all learn in different ways.
I don't just want to be told how something works. Please _show_ me how it works.
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do you have a favourite man page? thinking of writing a short blog post exploring man pages and what makes a good one and I'd love some more examples
my contribution: I think it's cool that `man curl` includes an example for every single option
@b0rk my favourite is the one for `true'. I present it as an example of a documented software. Seriously, how many present day software makers would bother documenting such thing?
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do you have a favourite man page? thinking of writing a short blog post exploring man pages and what makes a good one and I'd love some more examples
my contribution: I think it's cool that `man curl` includes an example for every single option
@b0rk I love `man ascii`.
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do you have a favourite man page? thinking of writing a short blog post exploring man pages and what makes a good one and I'd love some more examples
my contribution: I think it's cool that `man curl` includes an example for every single option
@b0rk I am actually surprised how many people here don't know https://tldr.sh. Or at least, thats a feeling I had while reading the comments on bad manpages.
`$ tldr tar`
It's a user composed tl;dr; printing out commonly used commands.
And recently I learned from https://youtube.com/@breadonpenguins about cht.sh. Its even better. Simply type `$ curl cht.sh/cups` and you get a awesome cheatsheet covering basic Linux printer things.
It somehow aggregates multiple sources. One of the sources is actually the tldr.sh page. -
do you have a favourite man page? thinking of writing a short blog post exploring man pages and what makes a good one and I'd love some more examples
my contribution: I think it's cool that `man curl` includes an example for every single option
@b0rk My bash_history thinks I've used
man gpgthe most lately but that is not an endorsement š -
do you have a favourite man page? thinking of writing a short blog post exploring man pages and what makes a good one and I'd love some more examples
my contribution: I think it's cool that `man curl` includes an example for every single option
@b0rk I see a sibling mentioned ascii(5). urxvt(7) is a great reference to terminal escape codes, broadly applicable even if it's not the terminal you use. There's probably a better reference but it's the one I know to turn to when I have questions.
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do you have a favourite man page? thinking of writing a short blog post exploring man pages and what makes a good one and I'd love some more examples
my contribution: I think it's cool that `man curl` includes an example for every single option
@b0rk `curl` is heads and shoulders above most other man pages I've read. Also, I have a terrible memory when it comes to curl, so it's always useful.
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do you have a favourite man page? thinking of writing a short blog post exploring man pages and what makes a good one and I'd love some more examples
my contribution: I think it's cool that `man curl` includes an example for every single option
@b0rk ffmpeg's seems pretty cool. It has graphs, even.
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@arrjay @aredridel this is awesome, I love `perlcheat`, I've never seen anything like that in a man page
@b0rk @arrjay @aredridel perlre(1) ā along with perlretut(1) and perlrequick(1) ā are the Complete Beginner's Guide to Regular Expressions. The language is quite gentle, especially for a subject that so many people find difficult.
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do you have a favourite man page? thinking of writing a short blog post exploring man pages and what makes a good one and I'd love some more examples
my contribution: I think it's cool that `man curl` includes an example for every single option
@b0rk I hate to be that nerd, but bash(1). I have had this bookmarked for years and years because it's such a good reference.
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@b0rk Special shout out to the official web address, since it's got hyperlinks on all the options:
@shnizmuffin thanks, will change my link!
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@matt "quantity has a quality all its own". Maybe I can write better code, given sufficient time. I can certainly write more concise code (especially in Perl).
But, the models write code an order of magnitude faster than I can, and they can write code 24/7. And, honestly, it's pretty good code, most of the time.
It's still true that the hardest part is deciding what to make rather than making it, but it's drastically easier to write software now with the AI than doing it myself.
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@swelljoe yup. But if you use it as a tool to assist you, you can assist yourself. I found that out yesterday.
https://berryvilleiml.com/2026/02/18/using-gemini-in-the-silver-bullet-reboot/
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@swelljoe That's interesting considering that if I'm not mistaken (based on your work on Webmin/Virtualmin), one of your best languages is Perl. I never seriously got into Perl, but it has a reputation for being quite expressive. So in theory, you should be able to express what you want directly in the language. It feels wrong that giving instructions to an LLM, in ambiguous natural language, and having it grind away, is kicking your ass even in a language like Perl. Like a failure of PL design.
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@clayote I mean, there are still problems it can't solve, but that set is much smaller than you would think if you last looked at it seriously any time up until a few months ago. The models now can search the web, instrument software so they can test without human intervention, and plan quite large/complicated projects for implementation across several context windows.
When driven by an expert, there is very little it can't do, and it does it all very, very, rapidly.
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@clayote it is quite wrong, as of October of last year, when the current crop of models arrived. As of Opus 4.5, Codex 5.2, and Gemini 3, when used in an agentic context (e.g. Claude Code), they're not limited to simple/repetitive code or code that is prominent in the training data.
The training data is "the entire internet and all of public Github", so it knows every language, every framework. Yeah, it's better at simple CRUD apps in TypeScript, but it also kicks my ass in my best languages.
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@clayote @swelljoe I'd say that was true not that long ago, but not necessarily now. More likely to be true of those people who don't even look at the output, which I think is atrocious.
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@noplasticshower yeah, I'm confident that many, if not all, of the major models have ingested the thousands of posts I've made to the forum I maintain for the OSS projects I work on. I feel ambivalent about that. On one hand, if someone is asking ChatGPT for help with my software, I'd rather it give reasonable answers than dangerous ones.
But, also, it sucks that the way it does that kind of thing is DDoSing my websites periodically and blatantly disregarding copyright or licenses.
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@swelljoe As a non-user of AI (lucky), my impression was that in the areas it works well in -- repetitive codebases that resemble ones in the training dataset -- the productivity increase also incurs technical debt at a rate higher than if you'd gotten some junior coders to do it; is that wrong?
