when do you usually use the man page for a complex command line tool to answer a question you have?
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i'm very curious about everyone who says "I'd look there first", if I want to figure out how to do something new I think I'll usually google how to do it rather than look at the man page, and then maybe later look at the man page to look up the details
(I've gotten enough of these answers:
- "I like that man pages don't require changing context"
- "with the man page I know I have the right version of the docs")@b0rk for me, I think it's a combination of an 'old people' thing and a 'highly suspicious of a lot of the modern Internet' thing.
When I learned to use computers, competent search engines and rich online resources like Stack Exchange were a long way off – even having the Internet in your home without paying per minute wasn't around yet. So you had to develop the skills of finding stuff out from the available local resources like manuals, because that was all you had.
Then good search engines came along, but I was always aware that there's a risk of depending too much on them and losing the ability to figure stuff out yourself. Even now, I sometimes find myself coding without the Internet (or effectively so – laptop on train with terrible connectivity) and it's useful that I can still get things done.
And now search engines are all getting enshittified, and/or monetised, and/or straight-up _worse_ (Google doesn't return the results I actually wanted nearly as often as it used to). And the less said about 2020s answers to this kind of question, the better. So I'm doubly glad I haven't abandoned my old approaches to things. More and more I feel it's important to keep external corporately-provided "do it for you" services at arm's length, and not base your whole workflow on them to the extent that you're a captive market or dependent on them not going down.
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@b0rk it depends somewhat on the program, and somewhat on what I'm trying to find out.
Man pages are usually good for finding out what an option does, if you already know the name of the option. Not all of them are so good for going in the other direction – if you know _what_ you want to do, and are trying to find out if there's an option that does it, and what it's called. Understandable, because the former is easier to write. But the latter is surely _more_ often what people want!
(Although not 100%. Reading other people's scripts is a common way to find out the name of an option you didn't know and now have to look up what it does.)
Usually I'll try --help before the manual, simply because it's likely to be shorter, so it's quicker to look through all the options and pick out the one I'm likely to want. Maybe if anything's still unclear I'll try the man page and hope it goes into more detail. But of course in some cases they do the same thing anyway: 'git foo --help' is no different from 'man git-foo'.
Of course, if you're starting from some task you want to perform another possibility is that you don't even yet know which _program_ you want to use, in which case a straight-up search engine might be the place to look first, looking for something like a Stack Exchange post that suggests a combination of program and options.
@simontatham @b0rk I agree with this answer. I selected, "I'd look at man first", but I actually check "--help" first, and I only really use these options if I think I know which command-ish or API I want to use.
This is my most frequent use case because I usually remember the shape of what I want but not the details.
If I don't have any clue - search engine.
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@b0rk I use man pages a lot but I typically find them on the web, as I find the CLI a pain to browse or search them.
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@b0rk For me, it is avery very old habit. When I started out poking at Unix systems, if I wanted to "get information from outside the computer I was on", I could, if I was lucky, turn my head and ask someone else in the same room.
Otherwise, I would have to fire up a newsreader, post to UseNet, wait for the UUCP spool to empty (over a modem), wait for the reply to be written, then wait for the relevant article to trickle back in a later UUCP update batch.
I will, frequently, after having opened the man page, start a web search pretty soon after, because many man pages are badly written (and I must say that good technical writing is a skill that doesn't necessarily correlate with "ability to write code").
@vatine @b0rk
Yup, same. My first laptop ran qnx 4 and came with the man pages on paper (it was something like 1.5 shelf-metres of very nicely bound softcover books), and I was coming from MS-DOS and Win 3.1. I spent a lot of time poring over those manuals to learn even the most basic stuff like "how to 'dir'" and "how to quit elvis". -
when do you usually use the man page for a complex command line tool to answer a question you have? (like git, openssl, rsync, curl, etc)
(edit: no need to say "i use --help then man")
@b0rk I look for the info manual first, then if it doesn't exist go for manpages, if it is incomprehensible I reach for a search engine.
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when do you usually use the man page for a complex command line tool to answer a question you have? (like git, openssl, rsync, curl, etc)
(edit: no need to say "i use --help then man")
@b0rk My default is `--help` first, then the man page, then search the internet. I don't think I have ever tried an info doc, even though GNU tools tell me to do that. Maybe because I never got into emacs?
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i'm very curious about everyone who says "I'd look there first", if I want to figure out how to do something new I think I'll usually google how to do it rather than look at the man page, and then maybe later look at the man page to look up the details
(I've gotten enough of these answers:
- "I like that man pages don't require changing context"
- "with the man page I know I have the right version of the docs")@b0rk in general I'm in the terminal, I know the command should do the thing I want, and man is in the terminal so I don't have to switch app (and being distracted by the browser)
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@b0rk for me, I think it's a combination of an 'old people' thing and a 'highly suspicious of a lot of the modern Internet' thing.
When I learned to use computers, competent search engines and rich online resources like Stack Exchange were a long way off – even having the Internet in your home without paying per minute wasn't around yet. So you had to develop the skills of finding stuff out from the available local resources like manuals, because that was all you had.
Then good search engines came along, but I was always aware that there's a risk of depending too much on them and losing the ability to figure stuff out yourself. Even now, I sometimes find myself coding without the Internet (or effectively so – laptop on train with terrible connectivity) and it's useful that I can still get things done.
And now search engines are all getting enshittified, and/or monetised, and/or straight-up _worse_ (Google doesn't return the results I actually wanted nearly as often as it used to). And the less said about 2020s answers to this kind of question, the better. So I'm doubly glad I haven't abandoned my old approaches to things. More and more I feel it's important to keep external corporately-provided "do it for you" services at arm's length, and not base your whole workflow on them to the extent that you're a captive market or dependent on them not going down.
@simontatham yea i think part of the reason I'm newly interested in man pages right now is that search engines are so much worse than they used to be
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i'm very curious about everyone who says "I'd look there first", if I want to figure out how to do something new I think I'll usually google how to do it rather than look at the man page, and then maybe later look at the man page to look up the details
(I've gotten enough of these answers:
- "I like that man pages don't require changing context"
- "with the man page I know I have the right version of the docs")@b0rk answered with that option as well. with alt+h in fish, it just opens as some kind of overlay, allowing me to search the man page without removing what I've entered first.
If the man page doesn't work, the second approach is `cheat <command>` with cheat being a fish function which queries cheat.sh/<command> and pipes the output into bat.
And only after that, I'll search for information via the browser ^^
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when do you usually use the man page for a complex command line tool to answer a question you have? (like git, openssl, rsync, curl, etc)
(edit: no need to say "i use --help then man")
@b0rk I'm sure how to vote, but usually my order is:
- --help
- man page
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when do you usually use the man page for a complex command line tool to answer a question you have? (like git, openssl, rsync, curl, etc)
(edit: no need to say "i use --help then man")
@b0rk usually —help first, then google or an llm to find the flags i’m interested in, then a man page for the details
in the middle i’ll try things; if they work i’ll either stop there, or skip the intermediate steps and go straight to the man page to figure out what the general behavior is now that it’s working in this specific case
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when do you usually use the man page for a complex command line tool to answer a question you have? (like git, openssl, rsync, curl, etc)
(edit: no need to say "i use --help then man")
@b0rk I usually start with a help command (usually shorter, probably covers what I need). the man page is like a tier 3 option.
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i'm very curious about everyone who says "I'd look there first", if I want to figure out how to do something new I think I'll usually google how to do it rather than look at the man page, and then maybe later look at the man page to look up the details
(I've gotten enough of these answers:
- "I like that man pages don't require changing context"
- "with the man page I know I have the right version of the docs")@b0rk It was a bit of a toss-up for me. Sometimes I'll go straight to man, other times straight to generic google alternative. Man has the advantage of being right there - I don't even have to change my window focus - and while it can be very dense, there's a good chance I'll find an answer in the introduction or the examples at the end. But often it's simply too dense and I'm more interested in quickly solving the problem right in front of me than mastering a new tool, and then I'll open a browser and do a search.
The bad news for man pages though is that quality has definitely declined over the years. More modern packages are less likely to have a good man page, or sometimes don't have one at all. It's pretty obvious why, no sense complaining about it, but it can be annoying.
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when do you usually use the man page for a complex command line tool to answer a question you have? (like git, openssl, rsync, curl, etc)
(edit: no need to say "i use --help then man")
@b0rk i'm using manpage, when I am already on the terminal with a relatively complex command, and I just need that one extra option. I hit Ctrl+A to go to the start, type "man " (and leave all the rest of the command in place!) and hit enter. Man doesn't care about that stuff after the first arguement, so it's relatively convenient.
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i'm very curious about everyone who says "I'd look there first", if I want to figure out how to do something new I think I'll usually google how to do it rather than look at the man page, and then maybe later look at the man page to look up the details
(I've gotten enough of these answers:
- "I like that man pages don't require changing context"
- "with the man page I know I have the right version of the docs")@b0rk usually Google just brings me to a online man page if it's a program that has an extensive man page or --help (git, curl, etc.). If I don't know the program has a good man page then I will Google.
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@b0rk It was a bit of a toss-up for me. Sometimes I'll go straight to man, other times straight to generic google alternative. Man has the advantage of being right there - I don't even have to change my window focus - and while it can be very dense, there's a good chance I'll find an answer in the introduction or the examples at the end. But often it's simply too dense and I'm more interested in quickly solving the problem right in front of me than mastering a new tool, and then I'll open a browser and do a search.
The bad news for man pages though is that quality has definitely declined over the years. More modern packages are less likely to have a good man page, or sometimes don't have one at all. It's pretty obvious why, no sense complaining about it, but it can be annoying.
@uastronomer when you say "it's pretty obvious why" what do you mean?
(is it that with stack overflow & the internet generally it feels like there's less pressure to have good docs than when they were the only source of information?)
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i'm very curious about everyone who says "I'd look there first", if I want to figure out how to do something new I think I'll usually google how to do it rather than look at the man page, and then maybe later look at the man page to look up the details
(I've gotten enough of these answers:
- "I like that man pages don't require changing context"
- "with the man page I know I have the right version of the docs")@b0rk i tend to first try to find the answer in the man page, and if i can’t do so quickly i’ll search for it on the internet. and if that fails, i’ll read the man page more carefully
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@b0rk if --help doesn't give enough info, man page is my second step
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i'm very curious about everyone who says "I'd look there first", if I want to figure out how to do something new I think I'll usually google how to do it rather than look at the man page, and then maybe later look at the man page to look up the details
(I've gotten enough of these answers:
- "I like that man pages don't require changing context"
- "with the man page I know I have the right version of the docs")@b0rk I've been using Linux since 1997 or so, with Slackware. I learned very early on that the only definitive source for the answer, or at least the first place one should look, is in the man pages.
I have never trusted any search engine, and nowadays, I certainly do not trust Google at all, especially with how evil the company is, and how they too force AI on everyone.
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i'm very curious about everyone who says "I'd look there first", if I want to figure out how to do something new I think I'll usually google how to do it rather than look at the man page, and then maybe later look at the man page to look up the details
(I've gotten enough of these answers:
- "I like that man pages don't require changing context"
- "with the man page I know I have the right version of the docs")@b0rk It kind of depends on the question—usually my question is something like “what's the option to do such-and-such again?” which is easily answered by --help or the manpage.
When it's something more conceptual, then --help probably won't explain it and my first stop will be the manpage to see whether it does, because it's authoritative and I already have it. If that fails, then I'll try the web, and maybe a relevant book if I have one.
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