do you have a favourite man page?
Uncategorized
119
Posts
85
Posters
0
Views
-
@b0rk it's `rsync` and it's not even close.
@shnizmuffin what do you like about it? (also: you mean this one right? https://linux.die.net/man/1/rsync)
i like that it takes a different approach to the SYNOPSIS and puts examples before the comprehensive list of all options, I haven't seen that a lot
-
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 it's an uncool example these days but...
i always really appreciated how `man perl` links to 40+ other man pages that collectively describe the entire language and its standard library and tools. so if you are trying to learn about it everything you need is there and can be browsed or searched for. the prose is fairly engaging and well-written.
(these days online might make more sense but at the time having it available offline in a very lightweight format that was readable from the terminal was great.)
P.S. the manual pages are actually produced by perldoc which is also a very cool related tool.
@d6 this is so cool, I've never looked at this before! makes me want to find out who wrote them.
-
@aredridel @b0rk oh, my favorite there is perllol(1)
@arrjay @aredridel this is awesome, I love `perlcheat`, I've never seen anything like that in a man 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 Off the dome, I feel like I remember the man page for find almost always getting me where I needed to go
-
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 always partial to `man man`.
Great to introduce people to `man` so they can bootstrap their command-line-fu.
-
@bretthaines the Mac grep man page?
@b0rk yes, my work computer is a mac so that's the one I pull up more often. I forgot the Linux one is different 😅
-
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
-
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 always think
hier(7)is really neat -
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 the one I've used the most is `man bash`, because it's not just a man page, it's the documentation for the whole scripting language!
-
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
I love the man bash
But although the lvm commands man. With useful examples that cover lot of case ! -
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 do like it too, even thought it makes the man page 7195 lines long 😃 .
-
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 don't believe to have a favourite. Yet, due to the rule (rather 'tip') "'Select' Isn't Broken", select(2) and the corresponding story behind the tip from the book "Pragmatic Programmer" comes to my mind :)
-
@b0rk I do like it too, even thought it makes the man page 7195 lines long 😃 .
-
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 was an early version of less(1), whose one-line synopsis was:
less - better than more(1)
Which it was, because you could go _backwards_... that was the first program I ever compiled from downloaded source.
-
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
I think my favourite man page example so far is this rsync man page (via @shnizmuffin) https://download.samba.org/pub/rsync/rsync.1
it gives examples BEFORE giving an exhaustive list of options!
the synopsis just says "rsync [OPTION...] SRC... [DEST]" instead of giving you an exhaustive list of options like "-ABCFGHILOPRSTUWabcdefghiklmnopqrstuvwxy1%"!
there's an "OPTION SUMMARY" section that gives you a 1-line summary of each option! (this feels SO SO much useful than the normal SYNOPSIS to me)
(2/?)
-
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 it's also my favourite hairstyle
-
@b0rk i always think
hier(7)is really neat@pounce that's cool, I'd never seen that
-
@shnizmuffin what do you like about it? (also: you mean this one right? https://linux.die.net/man/1/rsync)
i like that it takes a different approach to the SYNOPSIS and puts examples before the comprehensive list of all options, I haven't seen that a lot
@b0rk It leads with examples from most common to least common, and sorts its many options following similar logic.
It's basically ...
1. WTF am I looking at. (--verbose et al)
2. Sensible defaults (--archive)
3. How do I change one thing (--no-OPTION)
4. Filepath stuff
5. Link stuff
6. Permission stuff
7. File metadata stuff
8. Config stuff
9. Filter stuff
10. Shit one person needed once
11. --human-readable
12. please don't run forever
13. --version, --help
Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
-
@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.
-
@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/
-
@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.
-
@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.
-
@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.
-
@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.
-
@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.
-
@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?
