when do you usually use the man page for a complex command line tool to answer a question you have?

[adrianco@mastodon.social]

@lkanies @b0rk Agree with this.

[illicitonion@hachyderm.io]

@b0rk I think my algorithm is roughly:

If I imagine there's probably a flag that does exactly what I want, or I know there's a flag and I need to remember a detail (e.g. what the flag is called, what the valid options are for it, etc) I'll look in the manpage (and/or --help).

Otherwise I will look elsewhere, and probably never even fall back to the manpage.

[amethyst@toots.n7.gg]

@b0rk I like the convenience and predictable UX of a man page. I can press Esc-H in my shell to open the man page for whatever command I have pending on the command line, and (assuming it has one) I know I can always expect plain text with consistent key bindings to page through it, search for keywords, etc. The biggest unknown is always the potential quality of a man page, but that’s also true for searching online, etc.

[tcb@infosec.exchange]

@b0rk I can use grep to search the man pages and often get what I want much faster than a search engine will give me the same info.

I also find myself leaning even more heavily into man pages as the web becomes AI slop answers that may or may not show real commands and arguments.

[svengeier@mathstodon.xyz]

@b0rk For much of my working life any one computer wasn't guaranteed to be on the internet -- I'm in and out of cleanrooms (and we don't want Russian hacker kids in our $100M hardware so definitely no internet there) and/or in the air trying to make some instrument work on some survey airplane. Now I'm retired but the habit is still to look locally first and only reach outward if that doesn't get me anywhere.

[ppmfloss@mastodon.social]

@b0rk I use GNU Emacs to read manual pages. It has a builtin `man' command to display man pages. It also has hyperlinks to jump to. `man -k' and `appropos' helps for searching. More advanced `info' manuals are there if needed. Offline reading has its own benefits. My main issue is the man pages are very terse at the beginner level. But very smooth once we use a command more than 1 times.

[grumpybozo@toad.social]

@b0rk Man pages have a huge edge over searching the web in that they are generally part of whatever package provides the command they document. They aren’t for an earlier version or a different implementation. They are not usually written by people with weak understanding of the program.

[tonymottaz@social.lol]

@b0rk something I like about the fish shell is that the `help` command opens the bundled documentation site in your browser. It’s all local and pinned to the actual version you’re running. I would 100% take something like that for any CLI tool

[paul_ipv6@infosec.exchange]

@cstross @b0rk

man pages should be written and maintained with all the same care and accuracy as the code they document. updating code and man page should be part of the "definition of done" for any changes.

(have been bitten by folks that didn't have this level of care...)

[crzwdjk@mastodon.social]

@b0rk I used to use manpages a lot but so much of the software I use doesn't have them, or doesn't have particularly meaningful or comprehensive content there, that I have learned to start looking elsewhere. Git is kind of the exception here, the manpages are pretty good.

[packeteer@hachyderm.io]

@b0rk I find it's highly dependant on the use case. if it's just a quick check of syntax or similar, then yes help / man pages get hit first, but if it's a specific task I'm trying to do, and not sure of the best approach, then it's straight to google