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Comment by loudmax | Hacker News Reader

While they're at it, I hope they write complete man pages rather than pointers to info pages.

I see what you're saying, but then you'd have people complaining there was too much text in the man page. Note the info pages are available on the web so you could have a wrapper like:

    cinfo() { xdg-open "http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/$1-invocation.html#$1-invocation"; }

Which you could use like:

    cinfo dd

While I know the basic differences between info and man pages, can you shed some more light on your preference here for the less well informed.

Man pages are more convenient for the typical unix hacker - command-line oriented, vi-using.

They are rendered in less, which supports vi-like searching.

Info, on the other hand, is one of those odd pre-www hypertext systems. Advanced for its time, it is now clumsy and nonstandard.

What asher said. Man pages are convenient and man works nicely with other Unix command line tools. Info behaves more like a browser and plays by its own rules.

Its not that I want to discourage anybody from using their preferred documentation resource. If a developer would rather spend their time writing info pages, that's okay. But at least dump it into a man page. Even an oversized man paged like the one for mplayer is preferable to a pithy page telling me to use info. If I want something with hyperlinks I'll check the web.

Amen.

info > man

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