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by longislandguido 106 days ago
Many Linux man pages have the thoroughness of a fortune cookie, so I can understand the skepticism.

Jackpot if they're just a pointer to an 'info' page.

5 comments

Most people just discount man pages as unreadable and don’t even try to understand them.

Case in point: the jq man page is incredible and everyone I know instead runs off to google or stackoverflow or Claude to answer simple questions

The real jackpot is if they're the same as the --help command
I used to think this and used things like `help2man`. I now disagree, but throwing it out there.
I could use some "help2man." I don't know how to "man" /s
But its also true that many, many man pages have extremely valuable information that no enterprising hacker should overlook, too ..
I was never able to properly parse large man pages, I'm so happy that llms can now prepare half a usable command without spending an hour reading a time without a single usage example.
What I usually do when I have to read large man pages like bash(1) is I read them as PDFs:

man -Tpdf bash | zathura -

Replace zathura with any PDF viewer reading from stdin or just save the PDF. Hope that can be useful to someone!

my manpager is `vim -`, can't beat that
You probably can — by using neovim:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Neovim#Use_as_a_pager

https://neovim.io/doc/user/filetype/#_man

I've also been running (neo)vim as a manpager. You get the same features as with vim (like easily copying text or opening referenced files/other manpages without using the mouse), but neovim also parses the page and creates a table of contents, which can be used for navigation within the page. It doesn't always work perfectly, but is usually better than nothing.

`tldr` is also great. It's essentially a collection of example invocations of *nix commands.
TIL that what I have wanted in manpages for years exists. Thank you!
tldr is so good, i wish it was a part of the os the same way manpages are just to help out newcomers
Do we still have those? I think it was common in late '90s, due to GNU trying to get `info` gain moment but nowadays?
Mostly just the bash builtins have (had) this problem.