@b0rk Another reason I can think of is when you're working in environments that have strict version policies, so looking at available man pages gets you the documentation for the version of the tool you have installed. Needing to support older Ansible releases? Gotta check the bundled documentation with ansible-doc because the website is the latest rolling version.
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gibwar
@gibwar@infosec.exchange
Posts
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when do you usually use the man page for a complex command line tool to answer a question you have? -
when do you usually use the man page for a complex command line tool to answer a question you have?@b0rk I've written man pages before when building internal tools. It was fun learning the ROFF language or whatever. Part of my reluctance to do it with general tools is the requirement to install them as satellite files which is a bit of a pain when it comes to single binary downloads.
I know there's alternate locations you can put them, like
/usr/local/manand even$HOME/.local/share/manthe directory structure after that is also a bit of a pain. 😅 And then there's the need to remember to clean them up after the fact if you no longer use the tool.It'd be neat if some of these apps had the ability to drop the files and a cleanup step to remove them so they could still be single binary. Another thought would be extending man to see if the the requested page is available normally, and if not, see if there's a binary in the path that matches that name? Maybe the man page could be embedded in another section so it didn't have to be executed to generate help? 🤔