Sounds suspiciously like "if only people would read Terms of Service". A single document, given lots of leisure time, is fine. The aggregate of all man pages (or in my example ToS docs) is ridiculous.
I would argue that man pages are good if you know what you're looking for. The hardest part about modern tech stacks is knowing which layer (therefore which M) to RTFM.
I mean, man pages are searchable, immediately accessible, usually callable by the same name as the binary, somewhat standard in their formatting, and frequently exhaustive in at least the interface of the program. It's about 10x easier to `man someprogram` than it is to open a browser and google for some random answer in a lot of cases. What flag is it again? How do I format that string again?
Man pages are part of what I love about the unixy CLI experience. That is, in my opinion, a far cry from a hostile document like a ToS that is asking you to consent to things after going out of their way to be impenetrable and opaque.
The man pages are just trying to help you! Love them.
When I was at UCB in the 80's I regularly read the man pages. Learned so much. So, I would definitely disagree. I think it's an excellent way to learn about *nix and what it offers.
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Sounds suspiciously like "if only people would read Terms of Service". A single document, given lots of leisure time, is fine. The aggregate of all man pages (or in my example ToS docs) is ridiculous.
I would argue that man pages are good if you know what you're looking for. The hardest part about modern tech stacks is knowing which layer (therefore which M) to RTFM.
I mean, man pages are searchable, immediately accessible, usually callable by the same name as the binary, somewhat standard in their formatting, and frequently exhaustive in at least the interface of the program. It's about 10x easier to `man someprogram` than it is to open a browser and google for some random answer in a lot of cases. What flag is it again? How do I format that string again?
Man pages are part of what I love about the unixy CLI experience. That is, in my opinion, a far cry from a hostile document like a ToS that is asking you to consent to things after going out of their way to be impenetrable and opaque.
The man pages are just trying to help you! Love them.
What about googling "man somecommand" in the browser?
No (direct) google needed:
https://linux.die.net/man/
In the creators' defense, man has several methods to figure out what you're looking for. And this isn't modern, it came out around 1971 :)
The first is "apropos" or "man -k". You ask for a keyword and maybe a section and it lists relevant pages.
The second is intro pages. "man 1 intro" tells you about user commands. "man 2 intro" about system calls, and so on.
Third is the "SEE ALSO" lists. Once you find something relevant you start chasing rabbit holes.
And finally "man man" of course.
When I was at UCB in the 80's I regularly read the man pages. Learned so much. So, I would definitely disagree. I think it's an excellent way to learn about *nix and what it offers.