(discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27994194)
Haha! Adequate amount of fun was provided, please resume regular man activities.
Which means you need to usually make it explicit to call them (man --abba or something) than something that "surprises" the user.
.\" Take this out and a Unix Daemon will dog your steps from now until
.\" the time_t's wrap around.
.Pp
You can tune a file system, but you cannot tune a fish.
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.
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.
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
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?
My goodness. Man was written on a paper teletype.
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/idx/xcu.htm...
These would all be in section 1, if I am correct.
Run `apropos . | grep "(3)"`; you'll be surprised how many libraries come with man pages for their functions (e.g; curl).
Now I wonder if there are any IDEs that can automatically dial into these man pages and pull up documentation for functions?
Also, have you ever seen the DOS Borland IDE context sensitive help UX?
Step 2: Feel the urge to write an article about that
Writing down what you learn cements knowledge, and sharing what you write might help someone else.
info man
Perhaps the modern version of "man" should be a program you can talk to.
"Hey <agent>, use `man` to help answer these questions about grep"