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Comment by moffkalast | Hacker News Reader

"Link a man to man and you solve his problem for a day, teach a man to man and you've enlightened him for life."

Side note, calling the file system layout "hier" has got to be the stupidest naming choice. Did they want this to be lost forever so that nobody ever finds it?

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Once upon a time, the manpages were a printed object. This, coupled with some of Bell and later BSD's quirks about naming things, led to some historic naming conventions. See also: this entire damn conversation on naming directories.

One wasn't intended to call man directly, instead calling apropos first, finding the appropriate page to open.

But what if I need to read on how to use apropos? Then I need to do `man apropos` and I'm stuck in a cycle! /s

https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/apropos.1.html

There is "man hier" and also "man file-hierarchy": https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/file-hierarchy.7.h...

Well, as the man page itself says:

  HISTORY
     A hier manual page appeared in Version 7 AT&T UNIX.

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