In fact, the only reference to crontab(5) is in the SEE ALSO section (on my version anyway), but that doesn't say why you might want to see crontab(5), just that it exists. That is spectacularly useless
Depends. If one is aware of the meaning of section numbers, that "(5)" is very obviously suggesting that there is a file format named "crontab" which is documented. It's also pretty reasonable to suppose that the command and the file format of the same name are related.
A novice might miss the convention and the connection. Man pages are not quite novice material.
Maybe they could update man files so that it lists crontab(file format) instead of crontab(5)? Whenever I've seen numbered man pages in the past, I thought it was just a page number in the manual for the program
Hell, you don't even have to have a handle on what the section numbers mean for these things to be useful. The appearance of something in a "SEE ALSO" section indicates that the manual page author thought that that thing was both related to the thing being documented and worth reading if the current man page didn't answer all of your questions.
I can't count the number of times that following the trail laid out by 'SEE ALSO' sections a step or three has lead me to the exact thing that I never knew I needed to be using. Chasing those sections down is almost always well worth the three to ten minutes spent.
And, like, if one is expecting a man page to cover in detail everything even vaguely related to what it documents, and one doesn't feel one has ten minutes to spend reading things that people thought were important to bring to your attention... well, I guess one could go ask an LLM to slop out some related words. That'll probably take less than ten minutes, though correctness is not at all guaranteed.
That is incredibly stupid. A documentation system designed by someone who doesn't understand how people use documentation.
If man was designed by someone with any taste at all it would at least give you a menu to select (1) crontab command, (5) crontab file format. Maybe we need a rewrite in Rust to fix that.
And since man pages could take minutes to print out, if you needed one you'd tear that section of paper off and keep it in a binder for future (and faster) reference.
Programs these old are controlled by people who are very strongly opposed to change, even if it improves things. They like living in the 80s.
I absolutely guarantee if you propose this change the the GNU neckbeards who control man they will come up with some bullshit technical reason why it can't be done.
Not that I know of, but I haven't looked. I have written a similar program for pulling arm64 instruction pages (which have many duplicates), the whole thing is under 100 lines, and most of that is printing and file IO that would be handled by the manpager, the actual finding dups and presenting a menu is even simpler.
And maybe we need some versions: man version 1, man version 2 and so on. And of course, in the style of GTK, each one incompatible with all the others. Progress. /s
Incidentally, man --help on my machine shows "-k, --apropos equivalent to apropos", which isn't very useful. I know the two are equivalent, because they're on the same line of switches, what does it actually do?
With some further man digging, apropos is actually a separate program that looks through man page names/descriptions for the argument. Unless you run it with no arguments, in which case it just outputs "apropos what?" Instead of an actual error message like "No search term provided" or something
> Incidentally, man --help on my machine shows "-k, --apropos equivalent to apropos", which isn't very useful.
That's your hint to execute either 'man apropos' or 'man man'. Both tell you in detail what the flag and utility do.
You seem likely to be very disappointed in the '-h'/'-H' output of utilities from the BSD tradition. The output is often a list of all of the (almost always exclusively short) options presented as a sea of characters... and nothing else.
I mean, most of the -h/--help texts I've read are generally pretty good. Obviously not a full documentation for the program, but they tell you what the switches do. I wish there was a consensus on whether to use -h or --help though