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bityardyesterday at 5:35 PM1 replyview on HN

Man pages were always intended to be concise reference material, not tutorials or full docs. More akin to commented header files or a program's --help output, before the latter became common.

(GNU info tried to be a more comprehensive CLI documentation system but never fully caught on.)


Replies

bombcaryesterday at 6:01 PM

man pages got replaced by --help in many, many cases.

GNU info was an interesting experiment but it got replaced by online wikis.