Clarification: Just making fun of people(including myself) who watch shitty videos instead of official documentation.
Man pages fucking suck, and I say that having been working with linux full time professionally for 11 years.
The best ones have plenty of examples.
Man pages are useful references but go ahead and learn how to use sed or awk from their man pages.
Yep.
That's what the RTFM folks don't seem to understand: if you didn't even know, what you're looking for, you can't look it up.
This in general is the main reason for the ai surge. Just dump the 2 sentence explanation into a prompt and hope something sensible comes from it rather than googling for half an hour.
No, make it like this:
I have a problem with program x. Please tell me how i do y if I want z. Use this man page for reference:
[insert man page into promt py copy paste]
This gives way better results.
Most of the time you don't have to insert the man page, it's already baked into the neural network model and filling the context window sometimes gives worse results.
I noticed that mentioning commands you want gives good results e.g.:
Hi,
I want to replace line with HOSTTOOLS += " svn"
in all layer.conf files under current directory
by usingfindandsedcommands.
If it's more complicated, pasting parial scrript for LLM to finish gave better results (4 me),
than pure prompt text.
Man pages are for reference, not learning.
Man pages are for people who already know a lot about Linux and understand all the nuances and understanding of Linux
Even after using Linux for many many years I still don't understand wtf nearly all man pages mean. It's like a fucking codex. It needs to be simplified but not to the extreme where it doesn't give you information you need to understand it.
Tbh that's most of Linux, not designed for average people, designed by Linux users who think that all others should know everything about Linux.
Enter tldr and navi
Iโd like to add apropos to this as well.
my favorite is tealdeer!
Tbh a lot of man pages don't even give you enough usage information to make full use of a package. I'm thinking of the ones which are like an extended --help block
They also usually assume a lot about the users' knowledge of the domain of the program itself.
In my experience, many programs' man/help is very brief, often a sentence or less per command/flag, with 2 or more terms that don't mean anything to the uninitiated. Also, even when I think I know all the words, the descriptions are not nearly precise enough to confidently infer what exactly the program is going to do.
Disclaimers for potentially dangerous/irreversible actions are also often lacking.
Which is why I almost always look for an article that explains a command using examples, instead of trying to divine what the manual authors had in mind.
I really like the man pages, but they're an encyclopedia, not a tutorial. Great for looking up specifics when you already have a foundation. Not so great when starting out
When I was first learning programming I had a teacher who insisted that the only resource we could was the Java docs.
When you want to know what parameters you need to pass or what certain flags do, it's a great resource. When you don't even know how to iterate through an array, it's not the first place to look.
You're not a real linux user unless you've read the source because the documentation was inadequate.
I'd say that only those who manage to write a kernel code that doesn't upset Linus Torvald are true linux users.
Even Linus Trovald writes kernel code that Linus Trovald doesn't like.
My dryer broke the other day, which turned out to be the heating element. I watched a bunch of videos to try and figure out how to troubleshoot the problem and hopefully address it.
One of the videos, after an intro, claimed to have the solution. Then they proceeded to talk about the temperature control features of the machine and how I should make sure the heat is turned on.
That is the level many of the unix / software development videos out there. Just literally some AI slop or silly person who doesn't know what they are talking about uploading a quick clip to grow their channel.
Man pages are literally indecipherable as a newby
I just wish they'd put some damn usage examples in there. I usually just need to do one thing I don't need a dissertation about it.
Install tealdeer. Then instead of man programname type tldr programname.
Some man pages have them. I agree that they should be more common though.
You ask someone for instructions
They send you some bullshit 10 minutes long video
Now instead of ctrl+f or skimming the article and jumping where you want to go you need to jump around in a video
REEEE
"How do I do X in linux?"
"Yeah so basically you just need to run this command and it should work on Ubuntu 12.10 (Last edited: Nov 2012)"
"Hey guys the way to do X changed in Ubuntu 16.04, see this updated link (Posted: Jan 2017)"
"Actually Ubuntu 18.04 is now using Y so you have to follow this new guide (Last edited: Jul 2019)"
"~~Crossed-out outdated guide~~
For Ubuntu 22, please reference this Canonical guide here. All other distros can simply use Z (Last edited: Aug, 2022)"
"404 not found (Canonical)"
"How do I do X in Debian?"
"You can run Z to do X (Posted: Oct 2013)"
"Thanks for this, it worked! (Posted: Sep 2023)"
"How do I do X in Fedora?"
"Ah just follow this wiki (Posted: Feb 2014)"
"(Wiki last update: Mar 2023)"
"How do I do X In Arch?"
"RTFM lmao: link to arch wiki (Posted: May 2017)"
"(Wiki last update: 3 minutes ago)"
"How to do X on Y?" "Why would you ever want to do X? Do Z instead!"
Honestly I kinda like man pages. It is a pain but it is the least painful. And compared to e.g. the PowerShell docs, I love the man pages.
Some mans are unreadable. I've been curling cheat.sh/[command] and its been great for example commands. Highly recommend.
I also like tldr for new commands. Sometimes I discover new ways by using it on the commands I know...
Man pages suck ass. But not as much as fucking YouTube tutorials.
Can someone just write a nice plain English instruction page?
I'm in this image and I don't like it.
After many years of tiptoeing through the distros, from RedHat 5 and Mandrake6 to Slack to Gentoo and now Fedora 41. The last thing I want anymore is to need to go RTFM.
I don't want to open a terminal to compile anything, (I got stacks of tee shirts), or goggle, (yes goggle), to make things work. I'm too old for this crap and I don't have that much longer to live wasting my short time remaining staring at a terminal and reading man pages. Distros and Linux by extension should "just work" in 2025. And thankfully they do-- most of the time.
You want to be a Sysadmin and a cmd line commando, have at it. I'm peacing out.
Now if only GUIs could be called and worked telepathically. Or better yet, fix any problems before they happen without me even knowing about it.
That's one of the reasons why I prefer to run older, enterprise hardware.
There's a good chance, everything has been configured before and most distros work just fine without any tweaking.
I want a stable platform to work on, not another hobby.
To be fair we do the same with windows.
Free tech tip: https://cht.sh serves practical, usage-focused help on common command-line tasks. You can visit the website, or even better, curl for what you want.
$ curl cht.sh/touch
gets you this:
cheat:touch
# To change a file's modification time:
touch -d <time> <file>
touch -d 12am <file>
touch -d "yesterday 6am" <file>
touch -d "2 days ago 10:00" <file>
touch -d "tomorrow 04:00" <file>
# To put the timestamp of a file on another:
touch -r <refrence-file> <target-file>
Append with ~ and a word to show only help containing that word:
$ curl cht.sh/zstd~compress
Result:
tldr:zstd
# zstd
# Compress or decompress files with Zstandard compression.
# More information: <https://github.com/facebook/zstd>.
# Decompress a file:
zstd -d path/to/file.zst
# Decompress to `stdout`:
zstd -dc path/to/file.zst
# Compress a file specifying the compression level, where 1=fastest, 19=slowest and 3=default:
zstd -level path/to/file
# Unlock higher compression levels (up to 22) using more memory (both for compression and decompression):
zstd --ultra -level path/to/file
For more usage tips, curl cht.sh/:help.
I really like the man pages for commands that have examples of some common usage at the bottom, that gets you kickstarted and you can just adapt your own command from the example.
Hint: :q!
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