9mo ago

Man pages bad

97 comments

what's wrong with man pages?
- You need to read them apparently? I don't know, this is weird
  
  Yeah, many people don't want to read and understand, just copy and paste.
  I saw that in a lot of people I worked with on projects, they just look for something to copy and paste from the Internet without even trying to understand what it does. Just looking for some command without even paying attention to the text around it.
  I remember one girl once that I gave her the link to the documentation explaining step by step what she needed to do, a link I had to find myself and pass it to her, of course, even when it was her task. Those steps included some alternatives like "if you are in this situation, run this command, but if you are in this other situation, run this other command" but she ignored all the instructions on that page and started copying and pasting every command that was found there. When I asked her what she was doing and why she was running every command there without reading the explanations around them, she said she thought she just had to run all the commands on that page.
  
  I'm starting to see this a lot. Some man-pages are very verbose and one might not have the time, but for the most part, opening a man page and lessing through it doesn't take too long, and it's usually up-to-date
- They're the best. I mean, just look at the alternative that Windows offers... oh wait there isn't any.
  
  It opens a link in a browser...
- Some man pages are just gigantic lists of unintuitive parameters in alphabetical order with no usage examples and even if you know how to search for text in a man page (forward slash then the text you want to search for) you're just stabbing in the dark.
  Others are excellent.
  The problem with man pages is that you never know if you're getting the former or the latter.

Man pages are great to have, all documentation easily accessible, mostly complete and directly available in your terminal.
Compare this to the shitshow that is git --help in windows opening a stupid browser. Somebody should be defenestrated for that decission.
- alias git="DISPLAY= git"
  
  Thanks, good to know!

I'm so fucking sick of every Linux meme being negative... Like are we supporting the community or actively trying to sabotage it?
Fuxk all these memes
Linux makes the word turn
Learn it and support it
This all started as irony, but it has gone too far
Regroup and get creative you sad intelligent fucks
- Are your fuzzy socks in the wash?
- How can you feel good about yourself if you aren't shaming people with less technical capabilities? Next you'll say something crazy like believing in yourself. Nonsense, crazy person. Get out of here.

The internet is full of bad advice.
Man pages are never wrong.

At least man pages are better than ChatGPT or other generative LLM that can hallucinate
- The started feeding chatgpt bath salts and i deleted system32 on my linux :(

Man pages save me an online search multiple times per week. Not sure that you're no about
- It's a /s meme.

Actually man page good

Am I the only one using tldr?
- Well today my life just got easier. Thank you for the recommendation!
- Tldr is awesome.

Wrong meme. The dark place is systemd.

I get confused every time I install a distro and man isn't installed by default. I guess I get the bare minimum philosophy, but it throws me off every time. First thing I install is vim, man, git, and probably a couple other things I can't remember right now.
I do like a decent man page that has examples for us dummies and I have found that they have improved a lot over the years.
- There are distros that don't install man by default? Crazy.
  
  I once had to set up something on yocto. man pages matter.
- tldr is a billion times better than man pages,
  apt install tldr
  Trusssssst
  
  The best was on arch because I had no idea how to use pacman, which I needed to install man, when I needed how to use pacman. I will have to take a look at tldr. I mostly use Debian without a desktop environment, but have an Arch VM for gaming here and there. Works out.
  
  Agreed, in any context where I'd open man I'd rather tldr instead. If you needed to read chunks of documentation like in man I'd rather just google the docs instead than clunkily try to read in terminal.

"tldr pages. Simplified and community-driven man pages. The tldr pages are a community effort to simplify the beloved man pages with practical examples."
https://tldr.sh/
- I like this one even better!
  https://github.com/chubin/cheat.sh

Anyone who thinks this is just incapable of navigating them.
- You have to admit though, they are a blast of the 1980s to the face for those who are younger and not used to it. It might be intimidating.
- It's a /s meme, I thought it was obvious.
  
  I think you accidently made a meme that is just too close to the truth to be seen as sarcastic
- That's why I seldom use man pages, TBH. But I'm no developer, my needs are simple.

Was this bullshit meme created by AI?

Hey, I always check man pages, they are pretty usefull
- This is how you end up being bullied by hyenas

man "app" | grep "search keyword"

I don't get what's so wrong with man. If the creator neglected to add a -h option, then there's at least a chance somebody made a man page.

RTFM amaright guys?

If you're electing to use linux, you got time to burn. Spend a little time getting comfy with manpages. Little things like that really add up to being effective.

A lot of people in here need tldr before getting comfortable with man it seems

Laughs in RHCSA exam.
- Yhea, you really learn to dig through the man pages and, if you didn't already know, learn that they are quite helpful.

Reading man pages is a skill of it''s own and the quality of man pages vary. However the ways of figuring out how to do something. 'Command -h' or 'command --help' 'man command' Search online for 'command examples'.

man
<the package>
|lolcat
- man <the package> | cowsay | lolcat
  man ls | cowsay -y | cowthink -d | lolcat

Tldr ftw

Manpages are good reference documentation when you already know which tool to use and how to use it and just need to tweak something. They can often be overwhelming otherwise. Just look at the number of flags on any git command, for example.
- You've nailed this here, yet get downvotes. The amount of times I've gone to a man page and my eyes glaze over. Really handy to learn new flags or if you forget, but as an introductory material. They don't work for everyone. People learn in different ways, sometimes by doing and my brain isn't wired this way.

Are you saying man pages are bad or are you mocking those who don’t use it?
- They're saying don't read the manual that tells you how things work, just copypasta sudo command lists from some random blog like a normal person.
  
  Everybody go into your terminal and type sudo giverickyallmybankinfo
- Yes.
  
  yes in the sense of you saying man pages are bad or in the sense of you mocking those who don’t use it?
- It was a /s meme, I thought it was obvious.
  
  That’s what I thought too and had a good chuckle. But from the comments, it didn’t seem so.

The only "issue" with man pages is that they open in less and less is a bit too -- Vim-y. So you end up needing to read a manual on how to read manuals?
- man man
  
  Man man man man manly men~

Man pages are amazing, the day I learned how to read command syntax me y understanding of linux skyrocketed.

Why is Simba pogging

Does no one use info? I've worked with Linux a bit, and am currently taking a class on it. I mainly use man as well but I'm going to try info and see what happens
- info is basically only good for gnu utils afaik
  
  Interesting. I'll have to see if any specialized program has better info than man.

Honestly, I don't think I've used terminal in a year.
- You sure you're a Linux user?
  
  Yep, once you get your edge-cases sorted (like needing to run SketchUp 2016), Linux is set it and forget it for distros worth using.

Even with that title people still missed the sarcasm, mad

Man pages are fairly useless in my experience, at least compared to the internet. I can see where they had a place at some point though.
- I’ll never understand someone’s need to “self own” by exposing the fact they either won’t or can’t read.
  Man pages are great, you’re just not reading.
  
  Look, I don't need all of the options, just give me an example command for the common use case
  https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/find.1.html
  Jesus Christ, if I didn't know already what to type I would never figure it out

97 comments