do you have a favourite man page?
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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
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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 mine's probably OpenBSD's
utf8(7): https://man.openbsd.org/utf8 -
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 Probably printf. For no particular reason.
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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 The entire perl ecosystem. perlfunc(1), perlsyn(1), etc.
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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@social.jvns.ca
man getsis pretty good :p -
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
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@b0rk The entire perl ecosystem. perlfunc(1), perlsyn(1), etc.
@aredridel @b0rk oh, my favorite there is perllol(1)
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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 quite simple: `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 frequently use ascii(7)
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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 grep(1) because I have to pull it up every time I forget whether the string or the filename goes first! Also its example section is very good too.
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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
I have a soft spot for "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 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.
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@b0rk grep(1) because I have to pull it up every time I forget whether the string or the filename goes first! Also its example section is very good too.
@bretthaines the Mac grep man page?
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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...don't think I've ever found a man page readable, tbqh. :(
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@b0rk The entire perl ecosystem. perlfunc(1), perlsyn(1), etc.
@aredridel @b0rk You forgot perlre(1) which is pretty useful even if you're not writing Perl!
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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 The man page for telnet changed my life around 1992. I can't remember exactly why, but hopefully by posting this it'll spur my memory and I can go look it up and remember it and I'll let you know.
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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 Awesome post idea :-)
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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 it's `rsync` and it's not even close.
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@b0rk ascii(7)
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@b0rk I...don't think I've ever found a man page readable, tbqh. :(
@thatandromeda I have a hard time with them too, that's why I've been thinking about this
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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?
