On 6 Feb 2009, at 03:08, Jesús Guerrero wrote:
El Vie, 6 de Febrero de 2009, 4:03, Stroller escribió:
My experience is that only after learning the syntax of manpages (is
that itself documented?) do I find most of them tremendously easy to
navigate to find the one specific option I'm looking for.
If all the problem about man pages is navigation another pager
can be used.
I didn't really mean "navigate" like that.
And in the quote above I wasn't criticising navigation of manpages.
I just mean that if there's one option I want to find (I don't know -
list by date order in `ls` for instance) then I just find it
tremendously EASY to find that in a man page. You can search for a
word using the normal old "/" of `less` and 9 times out of 10 you find
the command flag very quickly (if not immediately).
If you're new to a command that's been recommended to you, or an app
you've just installed, then I find the "Synopsis" section is
tremendously useful, but it has to be said that:
less [-[+]aBcCdeEfFgGiIJKLmMnNqQrRsSuUVwWX~]
[-b space] [-h lines] [-j line] [-k keyfile]
[-{oO} logfile] [-p pattern] [-P prompt] [-t tag]
[-T tagsfile] [-x tab,...] [-y lines] [-[z] lines]
[-# shift] [+[+]cmd] [--] [filename]...
doesn't make any sense to the untrained eye. It just looks like
gobbledegook. There's maybe a Linux n00b manual that explains the
syntax of man's "Synopsis", but I'm sure I only learned to translate
the likes of the above after reading man pages for commands that I
already knew - learned through inference, osmosis and newsgroups.
If the problem is "contents" then that's nothing to do with
man, but with whomever made (or didn't made) the page.
Yes, but there's a problem with the MAJORITY of contents, perhaps of
the majority of people writing manpages? It just seems to be a culture
of the way man pages are written. They make perfect sense only with
experience - don't get me wrong, I love 'em and at least to a degree I
think that's how it should be.
But I think the criticism of someone who finds man pages difficult to
read "your own inadequate ability to read technical documents, ...your
own capacity for comprehension" is a tad unfair.
Take a look at this:
DESCRIPTION
Less is a program similar to more (1), but which allows
backward move-
ment in the file as well as forward movement. Also, less does
not have
to read the entire input file before starting, so with
large input
files it starts up faster than text editors like vi (1).
Less uses
termcap (or terminfo on some systems), so it can run on a
variety of
terminals. There is even limited support for hardcopy
terminals. (On
a hardcopy terminal, lines which should be printed at the
top of the
screen are prefixed with a caret.)
Commands are based on both more and vi. Commands may be
preceded by a
decimal number, called N in the descriptions below. The
number is used
by some commands, as indicated.
The first sentence could far better be written "Less is a program for
scrolling up & down through textfiles" - actually this highlights the
typical manpage charm of greater obscurity through complete
correctness. The second sentence doesn't seem valuable enough (these
days) for the main summary - it would be more useful to mention the
ability to search - and the 3rd sentence is more relevant to the 1970s
than today (the bracketed section which follows is more relevant to
the 16th century). Most newcomers to `less` will never have used
`more` or `vi`, and the last two sentences - well, there's just
something wrong with them. They're not very readable. I had to read
them twice myself - who the heck would think to use a NON-decimal
number, anyway?
Stroller.
