discuss: man pages
Subject:
Re: man pages
From:
David Lawyer ####@####.####
Date:
15 May 2003 22:11:26 -0000
Message-Id: <20030515221133.GB547@lafn.org>
On Thu, May 15, 2003 at 03:58:02PM +0100, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Here I am presenting my opinion on man pages and making a few
> suggestions on how LDP can deal with this.
This is part of the overall problem of integrating Linux documentation.
It's a big project that needs at lot of volunteer effort which the LDP
hasn't available at present.
> The GNU has been calling man pages outdated stuff and
> replaced them with info pages.
But I think they are still more widely used that info pages.
> Man pages cater to the expert who already knows what he deals.
Not always. Some are tutorial with examples, etc.
> If I am a new user trying to learn say what ls does from the command
> line, the almost infinite number of options would scare me off Linux
> for the rest of my life.
If you type ls --help it shows all the options and then by using
<shift><PageUp> you can go scroll back to the first screenfull of them.
The large number of options also illustrates the power of Linux.
[snip]
> /Cat myfile.txt/ - would display a text file on screen but you can
> only see the last part if the file contains more information than what
> would typically fit in a single screen(24 lines).
Use <shift><PageUp> to read what scrolled by too fast.
<shift><PageDown> scrolls back down.
David Lawyer
