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Comment by zvmaz | Hacker News Reader

> The man pages are readily available.

True, but I find the man pages not easy and quick to parse.

I'm not a fan of man pages. Or any documentation that focuses on textual explanations rather than examples in code (looking at you aws).

I recently found https://tldr.sh/ and found it more convenient. I ended up writing myself a vscode extension to have a quick lookup at my fingertips, since I am at least 60% of the time looking at a terminal in vscode

Right. I don't think you're supposed to read them top-to-bottom.

Use `/` and search for the things of interest (keywords, arguments, options, etc...). Use n/N to quickly jump forward/back.

Find has a particularly bad man page to find things that way.

AFAIK there is a find replacement with sane defaults: https://github.com/sharkdp/fd , a lot of people I know love it.

However, I already have this in my muscle memory: find <where> -name '<what>' -type f(file)/d(directory)

Works in 90% of situations when searching for some file in terminal, ie: find / -name 'stuff*'

The rest of the time is spent figuring out exec/xargs. :)

And once you master that, swap xargs for GNU parallel. I bet your machine has a ton of cores, don't let then sit idly. ;)

FWIW it's `-maxdepth 1` not `-depth 1`.

But yeah, you're right.

Dude, flashbacks. Aren’t you supposed to do a trigger warning or something first! ;)

you can grep the man page contents by using the following command

man <command> | col -b | grep "search_string"

I've used a small bash function. example : to search grep's manual for "lines", I type gm grep "lines"

gm () { man $1 | col -b | grep --color=always "$2" }

I also have something similar for grepping a command's help

gh () { $1 --help | grep --color=always $2 }

I usually try gh(grep help) and if I don't get what I'm looking for, I run gm(grep man).

It appears that I can also use tldr

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