When man pages worked perfectly fine and have been beaten into me to go there first for help.
How is “info coreutils ‘pwd invocation’” better than “man pwd”? The info command almost exceeds the maximum line length of some programming languages. Ok, ok, this is an exaggeration. But I am irritated to have to look for something twice when man should work.
Maybe I will alias man to info and man2 to the original man.
How is “info coreutils ‘pwd invocation’” better than “man pwd”?
Beats me…But man pages are famous for being both terse and cryptic. Me I installed the world renowned Xman and keep it running on my desktop as it’s memory use is practically nil
jplindy wrote:
>> How is “info coreutils ‘pwd invocation’” better than “man pwd”?
> Beats me…But man pages are famous for being both terse -and- cryptic.
> Me I installed the world renowned Xman and keep it running on my desktop
> as it’s memory use is practically nil
>
>
I find MOST info pages to be long… yet terse and cryptic and VERY
difficult to navigate… pretty much taking the worst parts of
“man” to a whole new plateau.
In the Konqueror addressbar both:
man: pwd
info: pwd
(I had to put spaces between the : and the p to avoid smileys)
give you nice formated pages.
If the contents is cryptic to you that maybe partly true. Partly it is that there is just enough and nothing more then what is needed. That is how the old Unix people worked. Every word not needed in documentation is confusing. You may like that or not.
But when you need a more narrative story, there are many good books around to learn from. After that, when you come to a task and know there was a statement, but does not remember exactly how it worked, the man pages are great to solve that because they sum up the possibilities in the shortest amount of space.
Ya know it never occurred to me to use Konq for a man page reader…
Hehehe, if I didn’t learn something new everyday life would be boring. Xman is an ancient program and not in the repo’s you’ll have to compile it from source, but that’s not too onerous a task as it’s very small and has no dependencies to resolve. Xman