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Comment by inopinatus | Hacker News Reader

ISTR it was Æleen Frisch (author of Essential System Administration) who recommended that all nix admins take one day a year to read through the entire manual sections (1) and (8), which I implemented thus:

$ cd /usr/bin ; man

(and repeat for other bindirs)

You will be amazed at what you've forgotten, and what your system can do.

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I was thinking about something along this: get a random number (say dd'ing from /dev/urandom count=1 bs=2 or using shuf), then get the modulo M with number of entries in /usr/bin, then find the Mth entry of the ls, and print the man page. A file containing titles of already printed man pages can be used to exclude doubles.

  $ cd /usr/bin ; man
  What manual page do you want?

Is there a command to get all the man pages? I tried `man *` and the internal help, but no luck.

Edit: q then Return did it. D'oh. The obvious follow-up question is how do I go back to the _previous_ man page?

$ man man ;)

Actually, I could not find anything relevant by searching it for "file" and "next". I guess it's purely the responsibility of the pager, which presumably is not part of man itself.

Here ya go; all section 1 (user commands) man pages:

man $(man -s 1 -k . | cut -d' ' -f 1 | sort | tr '\n' ' ')

Ah sorry that got escaped, was supposed to be

     cd /usr/bin ; man *

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