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

[b0rk@social.jvns.ca]

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")

[thomastc@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@b0rk I start with --help because if it doesn't work, it's unlikely to do anything undesirable either.
Then I try -h.
Then the man page.
If all those fail, a web search.

[sj@social.scriptjunkie.us]

@b0rk if I am looking for a specific flag and I know the keyword I'm looking for, man page it is, but if I just have a fuzzy idea, like "find all files created after June 4" then typing that into an AI spits out the right flags far easier than scrolling through pages of "-newermt" in a man page

[mair@mathstodon.xyz]

@b0rk depends if I'm looking for "what's the letter option to save curl output to a file" (man) or "What's the incantation to do a fairly complex thing with ffmpeg" (stackexchange)

[letoams@defcon.social]

@b0rk i do try —help first but you made that one option. Also if at the start of the man page I find it very unclear I hit /example to find the example section

[philsplace@mastodon.sdf.org]

@b0rk

I have this wonderful program called Dash that has LOTs of documentation… for those cases when I am in my camper working on personal projects.

I typically look there first.

(I mostly camp places without cell or wifi)

https://kapeli.com/dash

[skirmisher@snoot.tube]

@cr1901 @b0rk @simontatham for certain tools that have a capital-M Manual—you know, the organized kind that you'd get an HTML or PDF render of—you'll sometimes find the HTML packaged in Linux distros (as a separate -doc subpackage if not in the main package itself). but to open such docs, you'll have to root around in /usr/share{,doc}, and that's if you know the manual exists in the first place; you might just as well find a bare-minimum README...

seems like there's an unfilled niche for making a system's heterogenous doc tree more discoverable. something with slightly more tailored UI than a directory tree view (let alone navigating to each one individually). a generated HTML page would be a good start, and a plugin for KHelpCenter and such would be really cool. it's entirely possible there's an existing solution here I'm just not familiar with, though