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Comment by oakenshield | Hacker News Reader

It's like people don't know about man pages anymore. Google is the man page... only you may not get your answer on the first try.

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You can add Unix Manpages to your "Subscribed Links" in your Google preferences, and then you will get your answer on the first try.

Thanks!

They do but nobody wants to memorize everything off some man page. There are thousands and generally, man pages are considered references where you dig up one thing at a time.

Then there are man pages that are actually being studied with great care, such as bash. And even bash man page is notorious for containing an endless amount of information. You can read it several times and still you will bump into a blog post or HN comment that reveals some previously missed (but documented) bash feature.

Telnet conveniently prints "Escape character is ^]" and that's why everybody knows it. I must admit it probably never occurred to me that ssh must have some sort of escaping method as well.

Well, thanks to HN for that link anyway :)

On rare occasion, Google does give me a man page, but more often than not, someone has answered my bone-head question in simple terms in a forum somewhere.

Oh, I wasn't dissing the Google method. I'm just saying that if people bothered to read the whole manpage for some application just once, they'd know of the "cool" features they might need, instead of waiting until someone posts it on HN or reddit.

The issue being that not all manpages are created equal. Some only document 2% of the program's functionality, others drone on and on about insignificant features, others are just unclear in their wording. It makes it so that people only consult the manpages when they need to.

That said, reading the manpages for something that you use all the time like ssh is a good idea. (Though if you use zsh, I'll take a bit to go through all of the documentation)

That's one reason to favor BSD over the ill-advised GNU/Linux info page movement.

The BSDs take man pages quite seriously.

People don't read documentation. I clicked on this thing thinking "No, it's can't just be about the ~ escape, right? There's some content here.... Right?"

I lost. It's a blog post about a documented feature. Tune in next week for the "-j" option to tar!

Seems you haven't read your man pages recently. -j is deprecated. Yes, tar has implemented auto-detection after all these years!

  tar xf linux.tar.bz2

Brought to you by "A note from a random man page".

Uh... my man page says nothing about deprecation, it just documents its behavior.

And I certainly still find it useful, in any case, for situations where autodetection won't work -- for example when you are creating an archive. Y'know, with the "-c" flag that apparently you haven't read about yet.

Bazinga!

(edit: What I find most interesting isn't so much that you goofed your snipe, which happens all the time. It's that someone upvoted it.)

Try doing that on older Solaris's or AIX machines.

That can often only help if you read the documentation before you want to anything with the program in question. For problems for which you (a) already have a solution and (b) do not know that the program has a better solution for, why would you read the man page?

I think people have learned not to use man pages because the man pages in GNU land almost universally suck. Check out OpenBSD's for some examples of really good documentaion

My take on man pages is "If you want people to RTFM, make a better FM".

(not mine originally)

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