On 10/7/22 10:23 AM, Philip Webb wrote:
There's the Wayback Machine, which tries to archive all I/net pages ever.
Sadly, there are a lot of pages that the Wayback Machine a.k.a. The Internet Archive doesn't have archived. TIA / WM is a best effort system and is a lot better than not having anything at all.
I've never used it, but it should have copies of man pages going back, which would allow you to reconstruct the history of the commands.
I don't think that searching the internet for old copies of man pages is going to be as productive as one might hope. First there's the SysV vs BSD lineage to account for. Second there's all the other things that don't fall in the SysV / BSD camps, mostly older.
I'd suggest inquiring on the TUHS or COFF mailing lists for pointers to history of various commands. You may very well be pointed to archived man pages. But you'll also have comments from people who maintained commands and possibly added the option that you're most interested in.
-- Grant. . . . unix || die
