logoalt Hacker News

longislandguidotoday at 5:58 AM5 repliesview on HN

Many Linux man pages have the thoroughness of a fortune cookie, so I can understand the skepticism.

Jackpot if they're just a pointer to an 'info' page.


Replies

gcrtoday at 11:41 AM

Most people just discount man pages as unreadable and don’t even try to understand them.

Case in point: the jq man page is incredible and everyone I know instead runs off to google or stackoverflow or Claude to answer simple questions

Almondsetattoday at 11:15 AM

The real jackpot is if they're the same as the --help command

show 1 reply
halaprotoday at 10:15 AM

I was never able to properly parse large man pages, I'm so happy that llms can now prepare half a usable command without spending an hour reading a time without a single usage example.

show 2 replies
aa-jvtoday at 9:21 AM

But its also true that many, many man pages have extremely valuable information that no enterprising hacker should overlook, too ..

darkwatertoday at 8:29 AM

Do we still have those? I think it was common in late '90s, due to GNU trying to get `info` gain moment but nowadays?

show 1 reply