> (... less common section numbers)
One very important section number is 5 - it's for file formats. So if you forget the crontab format, you need to invoke `man 5 crontab` to read about it.
One very important section number is 5 - it's for file formats. So if you forget the crontab format, you need to invoke `man 5 crontab` to read about it.
If man was designed by someone with any taste at all it would at least give you a menu to select (1) crontab command, (5) crontab file format. Maybe we need a rewrite in Rust to fix that.
Why is it that the Rust community thinks that the solution to every flaw in an application is a rewrite in Rust?
I absolutely guarantee if you propose this change the the GNU neckbeards who control man they will come up with some bullshit technical reason why it can't be done.
odds are, it doesn't.
My goodness. Man was written on a paper teletype.
https://imgur.com/a/kEkmRxx (link shows a screenshot of khelpcenter showing the different manpages available for crontab)
man was designed at a time you likely can't conceive of.
Can you even imagine designing something that's being actively used and talked about a HALF CENTURY later?
And maybe we need some versions: man version 1, man version 2 and so on. And of course, in the style of GTK, each one incompatible with all the others. Progress. /s
Depends. If one is aware of the meaning of section numbers, that "(5)" is very obviously suggesting that there is a file format named "crontab" which is documented. It's also pretty reasonable to suppose that the command and the file format of the same name are related.
A novice might miss the convention and the connection. Man pages are not quite novice material.
I can't count the number of times that following the trail laid out by 'SEE ALSO' sections a step or three has lead me to the exact thing that I never knew I needed to be using. Chasing those sections down is almost always well worth the three to ten minutes spent.
And, like, if one is expecting a man page to cover in detail everything even vaguely related to what it documents, and one doesn't feel one has ten minutes to spend reading things that people thought were important to bring to your attention... well, I guess one could go ask an LLM to slop out some related words. That'll probably take less than ten minutes, though correctness is not at all guaranteed.
Incidentally, man --help on my machine shows "-k, --apropos equivalent to apropos", which isn't very useful. I know the two are equivalent, because they're on the same line of switches, what does it actually do?
With some further man digging, apropos is actually a separate program that looks through man page names/descriptions for the argument. Unless you run it with no arguments, in which case it just outputs "apropos what?" Instead of an actual error message like "No search term provided" or something
That's your hint to execute either 'man apropos' or 'man man'. Both tell you in detail what the flag and utility do.
You seem likely to be very disappointed in the '-h'/'-H' output of utilities from the BSD tradition. The output is often a list of all of the (almost always exclusively short) options presented as a sea of characters... and nothing else.