do you have a favourite man page?

[web_martin@mastodon.social]

@b0rk my favorite one is man after midnight (gimme gimme gimme!)

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man-print-gimme-gimme-gimme-at-0030

[web_martin@mastodon.social]

@b0rk “The maintainer of man is a good friend of mine, and one day six years ago I jokingly said to him that if you invoke man after midnight it should print "gimme gimme gimme", because of the Abba song called "Gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight":
Well, he did actually put it in.”

[emmatebibyte@app.wafrn.net]

literally anything at man.openbsd.org is amazing

[harmoniousanger@zeroes.ca]

@b0rk top(1) on linux. starts out with how to quit and how to get interactive help, ends with a "stupid tricks" section providing food for thought about what top actually does.

[callmedawn@tech.lgbt]

@b0rk I like the mdoc man page (at https://man.openbsd.org/mdoc ), partly because it's a nice example of a high-quality readable-and-searchable comprehensive reference for something that's by necessity large and somewhat complicated, and partly because it's one of not very many man pages out there that can be _its own_ example.

[elilla@transmom.love]

@b0rk I love tealdeer (tldr) precisely because it fills the manpage gap in examples for every common operation

[mjd@mathstodon.xyz]

@b0rk @d6 Here's a very rough count (based on git-blame) from v5.26.0:

842 Nick Ing-Simmons
964 David Mitchell
1197 Nicholas Clark
1331 Yves Orton
1453 Ricardo Signes
1854 brian d foy
2186 Sean M. Burke
2513 Andy Dougherty
2851 Perl 5 Porters
3441 Lukas Mai
3485 Tom Christiansen
3836 Rafael Garcia-Suarez
4454 Dave Rolsky
5181 Father Chrysostomos
5313 Jarkko Hietaniemi
5782 Larry Wall
8959 Gurusamy Sarathy
11712 Karl Williamson

This has all the usual problems with git-blame. For example, if one person wrote a file and late someone else rewrapped all the line breaks, that second person would get all the credit.

Tom and Larry's contributions, being older, are going to be obscured by stuff like that.

The cast is only a cast of a couple of hundred, not anything like thousands.

[feld@friedcheese.us]

@b0rk man ipfw on FreeBSD is quite long but very well laid out IMHO

[elilla@transmom.love]

@b0rk actual manpages that I like:

#3. man 5 systemd.network
#2. man 6 nethack
#1. man 7 ascii

honorable mention: man 6 oneko
honorable mention: info libc

[samir@mastodon.functional.computer]

@b0rk I really like the git-revisions manpage.

[dmerej@mamot.fr]

@b0rk @shnizmuffin

I use `man date` very often when I have to format dates - most programming languages use the same syntax so it's convenient when I don't remember if %m is "month" or "minute"

I like it because I know where to look and it works for a *lot* of programming languages (Go and php being rare exceptions)

[b0rk@social.jvns.ca]

i tried implementing this OUTPUT SUMMARY format for grep's man page, I can't tell if I like it or not but it's an interesting exercise to try to give a 1-line description of each item, categorize them, and then order them most-frequently-used-by-me first https://gist.github.com/jvns/9f5966633875a4758e0d947a5b4dbdcf

(probably some of the descriptions are wrong, I only thought about them for maybe 3 seconds each, also this is Mac grep)

(3/?)

[scriptfanix@maly.io]

@b0rk
The rsync manpage is among the greatest. One of its great feature is the list of every return code and their meaning, really helpful when scripting!

I'm quite fond of the bash manpage
@shnizmuffin

[simon@tutut.delire.party]

@b0rk `man ascii` is the one i look at most often

[gkrnours@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@b0rk openbsd man page for chmod is much easier to read than the one on linux in my opinion.

[phred@weirder.earth]

@b0rk I have a /least/ favorite, it’s sudoers(5). Dense paragraphs followed by an EBNF grammar of the config format 😭

What I would *expect* to find there is a practical discussion of how to set it up with some simple examples that will set me on my way. I appreciate that authentication is complex & sensitive, and this documentation is very detailed but … I always bounce off this manpage and end up on stackoverflow instead.

https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/sudoers.5.html

[sanskritfritz@fosstodon.org]

@b0rk
The fish shell ships a python script that extracts this information from the man pages and convert them into tab completions.
/usr/share/fish/tools/create_manpage_completions.py

[jlargentaye@mas.to]

@b0rk @shnizmuffin hah, rsync’s man page (alongside Bash) is to me an example of everything wrong with manpages, because I’m usually looking for a reference explanation of an argument and I have to skip through all the unhelpful examples before getting the actual option explanation.

It’s a shame that GNU Info never stuck. A hierarchical documentation really is the best organization over the flat and not hyperlinked manpages.

(To be fair Info’s UX sucks)

[jlargentaye@mas.to]

@b0rk @shnizmuffin (and Bash’s manpage sucks because it’s just the flattening of its huge and extensive Info doc. When searching is the only navigation option, it’s a chore)

[marginalia@mastodon.social]

@simon @b0rk `console_codes` is also very nice.