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0 pointsblueblob12y ago0 comments

I found the term page ambiguous just on the very first use, whether you meant printed pages, or manpages.

I am running archlinux which would normally be light, but unfortunately I work with a lot of different programming languages and prefer different tools for each. I did not deduplicate any of the manpages. The number of packages that I have installed, listed by `pacman -Q|wc -l` is 1241.

I agree that it would be nice to have a single place to go to get all of the details, but I think manpages suffer from more than just examples. I think that someone just starting *nix is likely to look online. While you can search manpages with apropos or man -k it doesn't search the whole document and people just starting don't know the terminal commands to search more.

I would rather have 2 commands and have all of the information than just manpages that don't get frequently updated.

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dredmorbius12y ago

I found the term page ambiguous just on the very first use, whether you meant printed pages, or manpages.

"man page" == a given 'Nix feature's manual entry. I've tried to use "manpage" where this is being presented.

"Pages" without the "man" modifier indicates the number of printed pages produced (defaulting to one page per 56 lines of output using 'pr'). The page count is actually reduced somewhat when printing postscript: 72 vs. 98 pages for bash(1).

While you can search manpages with apropos or man -k...

Again: this is where tools such as Debian's dwww (also available on Debian derivatives such as Ubuntu) come in very handy: the manpages are presented as Web pages on the localhost webserver, and with an installed search engine ("swish++"), the full text of all documentation is indexed.

And just to be clear: Debian provides copious amounts of documentation packages: manpages, info pages, the Linux Documentation Project (in HTML or ASCII text: doc-linux-html / doc-linux-text), RFCs, and multiple guides and such. With dwww, all of this is presented locally as web documents, indexed, and searchable. Seems there's little reason Wikipedia couldn't be included as well, though you'd want to sync that regularly.

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