tired of info pages

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.

Final grade:

man - C
info - D-

Info pages deserve to go the way of the dodo.

If you use info:/<filename> in the Konqueror location bar, you can benefit from GUI style navigation through an info file.

> Me I installed the world renowned Xman and keep it running on my desktop
> as it’s memory use is practically nil

i’ve not tried Xman (but will)…if you use KDE, have you tried using
Konqueror as you manual reader?

in the location line, put (for example)

#ls

which will either pop up the man page for ‘ls’ or give you a list
of all possible man pages for ‘ls’ on your system

pick one, and then when displayed you can easy search the page just
by holding Ctrl and pressing ‘f’…

which (you probably already know) opens a search dialog at the bottom
of the Konqueror window…

hmmmmm…i use KDE3 and i read that ‘they’ made some ‘improvements’
to Konqueror in v4…i hope they didn’t improve away the #xxx
function </sigh>

DenverD (Linux Counter 282315) via NNTP, Thunderbird 2.0.0.14, KDE
3.5.7, SUSE Linux 10.3, 2.6.22.18-0.2-default #1 SMP i686 athlon

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

I agree man is much better than info.
Info is just overkill.
Meanwhile man is simple and effective.