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Comment by deafpolygon | Hacker News Reader

Always check the man pages..

And I said that the man pages would be a part of what you have to examine. 95 pages in the case of bash (that's after running it through troff). man pages were fine when they were three pages long, but their lack of any internal index has become a problem.

Ok, now you might have a dozen files which could contain the information, where the location of each file can be modified by environment variables. It's tolerable if you are working on something you change weekly, but a practical problem if you do it yearly or it's entirely new.

'man bash'. Type G. Press PgUp until you see the FILES heading (took one press for my terminal size). There's your list of files. Alternatively, instead of G and PgUp, type /FILES<Enter>.

Of course, this doesn't help at all when software either doesn't have manpages, or doesn't include the list of files in the manpage. Just nitpicking your bash example.

This is HN, not Reddit. You can safely assume that every single person here knows how to use man, particularly if they mention using troff to format it properly. There remains a problem.

I truly wasn't sure if they were aware of man's search and go to options, as they brought up 95 pages as being why it was hard to find configuration file locations for bash.

When I'm searching for configuration file location, I do use '/FILES' or PgUp from the bottom of the manpage, so the length of the manpages is irrelevant.

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