[dTal]

I've often thought this - that xkcd.com/1168/ is funny is a terrible embarrassment. I would also like to add that manpage syntax help should be standardized and machine-parseable. I had an idea recently to auto-generate GUIs for command line tools from the manpage syntax line, but it turned out that while such lines look precise but cryptic, they are often in fact highly ambiguous, nonstandard, and still cryptic. This seems broken to me.

[james2vegas]

Blame man(7), have a look at mdoc(7): Semantic markup for command line utilities: Nm : start a SYNOPSIS block with the name of a utility; Fl : command line options (flags) (>=0 arguments); Cm : command modifier (>0 arguments); Ar : command arguments (>=0 arguments); Op, Oo, Oc : optional syntax elements (enclosure); Ic : internal or interactive command (>0 arguments); Ev : environmental variable (>0 arguments); Pa : file system path (>=0 arguments)

[JetSpiegel]

Linux kernel tools solves this, but the help looks cryptic and is difficult to parse by a human(such as myself).

I can't find documentation on what I mean, but try ip --help