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by crispyambulance 2459 days ago

    > ... there is already a method of that: the ~/bin folder.
More power to you if you can do that, but for me it's a memory problem and a problem of being able to figure out WTF options I need when I am in the middle of something.

man pages (and --help) are great if you have the time to sit down, ponder and experiment. But when you're trying to get stuff overwith, a massive wall of historically interesting text just isn't helpful.

The vast majority of invocations of any given command, I suspect, are limited to a not more than a handful of use-cases. In other words just enough combinations of arguments and options to perform a small number of different tasks. This is what people are typically interested in when they're on the command line. In that context getting massive dump of every possible option in a man page is frustrating and counter-productive.

For example, "tar". I use this command in 2 simple ways: archive a directory into a gzipped tar or extract a gzipped tar. This is what effectively everyone uses it for >99% of the time: toggle between a directory and a tar.gz file.

Basically... just 2 forms "tar -zxvf" and "tar ..." oh shit, I forgot how to tar/compress a directory, let's check the man page... ok "tar -cf" to create a tar, but wait I want it gzipped, and actually I forgot what the z, v and f stand for, now I need look each of those up, wait, do I really mean gzip? or bzip, oops more research.

To be fair, tar might be too easy an example but you can easily go down a manpage-rabbit-hole because of a lack of common usage examples.

2 comments

I think it’s just a habit to turn these two or four versions of using tar into the same amount of one liner shell scripts. Or maybe a longer one with options and usage printing.
The perfect tool for your problem is https://tldr.sh/.

You don't even have to write the pages yourself, there are a lot of already pre-written.