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Comment by andrewrn | Hacker News Reader

I might get lit on fire for this, but I don't find manpages very easy to use. If want to quickly remember an option or argument order, I am met with a wall of text.

Does anyone have tips for how to make it more useful? Maybe I could grep better for options? For example in the link, the author lists out common curl commands like making a POST request or adding a header. If you tried to look through the manpage for this, this would take a long time.

There's another utility called tldr that does a better job of this by providing common usage examples that almost always instantly give me what I need, but its not nearly as comprehensive as man.

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Add this to the end of .bashrc

function cheat() { curl cht.sh/$1 }

Then in terminal you can use the following to see the examples: $ cheat curl

Holy shit this website is insanely helpful. Many thanks!

> Does anyone have tips for how to make it more useful? Maybe I could grep better for options? For example in the link, the author lists out common curl commands like making a POST request or adding a header. If you tried to look through the manpage for this, this would take a long time.

You can search a man page by pressing the '/' key, typing in what you want, and pressing 'enter'. 'n' jumps to the next instance of your search string 'N' jumps to the previous instance.

Okay good point… I still think common usage examples would be nice because I don’t even know what some commands are capable of

Some man pages are better than others. OpenBSD's man pages are usually very good. Linux's man pages sometimes are so bare that they're worse than if they weren't there at all.

I actually completely agree. I am learning OpenBSD and the man pages are very good, but all too often I find myself reading them, beating my head against the wall, and then googling or using tdlr or gippity.

For example, I just was digging into BSD_auth and authenticate, and I don't know much about how auth works generally. I found it pretty tough to grok from the man page. I love the idea of learning everything from directly within the system and man pages, but I might just not be smart enough for that.

I often find it easier to read man pages in the browser. Use `man --html=<browser executable>`.

I find man pages to be useful when I’m already familiar with the command or topic. For long man pages, I usually get on fine by `grep`ing for relevant key-words.

I agree that they are daunting and not so helpful for users who are new to the command or topic. They usually lack a quick-start guide with examples that give the user a starting point to build upon.

Anyhow, after hearing about `tldr` for close to a decade, your comment inspired me to install it. When I tried running `tldr curl`, I was delighted to learn something new and useful:

    # Resolve a hostname to a custom IP address, with verbose output (similar to editing the /etc/hosts file for custom DNS resolution):
    curl --verbose --resolve example.com:80:127.0.0.1 http://example.com

Ask your AI tool of choice - it’s great at reading manpages. I also add my most favourite prompt instruction “be succinct”. :)

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