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Comment by divbzero | Hacker News Reader

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divbzero·

> The Linux man pages are upside down. Examples don't come till the very end, if at all.

man pages are meant to be a full reference, not a quick tutorial.

To get the quick tutorial others have already mentioned cheat.sh [1] and tldr pages [2] is another good resource.

[1]: https://cheat.sh/

[2]: https://tldr.sh/

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They can still be both! You can flip the general structure of man pages to be examples first while still having all the complete reference material after.

The downside of that is that searching for something would mean I'd first get the examples, and then the reference.

Or just use tldr, which already does what you want.

> man pages are meant to be a full reference, not a quick tutorial.

Yes, and for both quick and longer tutorials, there are also these things called books and courses - both of which are available in hard copy / offline as well as soft copy / online versions from many years now :) Many of us grew up using them and investing in them for our careers ...

+1 for tldr.sh. It's fantastic, I use it all the time, sometimes randomly for stuff I haven't got installed to find out whether I should homebrew it or not. Unlike man pages, tldr can search and find docs for stuff you don't currently have installed.

And it's fun to read. It's how man pages should be written, at least have a tl;dr before boring you to death.

Big +1 for tldr from me. And the commands are effectively a wiki (or maybe it's stored in git). Anyway you can contribute to them.

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