-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At some point hitherto, Mansur, Warren hath spake thusly: > I was actually on a newsgroup where someone had never user tar before. > They read the man page, and after trying and trying to understand all > the options they just got frustrated and posted to the newsgroup asking > how to make a simple tar file or expand a simple tar file.
Here again, books are the answer. They generally show you how to perform the more common tasks, with fairly precise examples. A great book for this is Nemeth, et. al., Unix System Administrator's Handbook. It covers Linux, and they will soon be releasing a Linux-specific version of the book. :) > Perhaps the most common uses could be displayed at the top and leave > the more advanced uses for later on. I understand your point, but might be inclined to disagree. In my experience, the most common usage of man pages is to look up some option that you've forgotten. Having that information closest to the top is more efficient for finding it. True, if you're new to a particular command, the Synopsis section has a lot of information in it that will be meaningless to you unless the command has reletively few options which are perhaps somewhat self-explanatory, but if that's the case just ignore the Synopsis section altogether until you've read the rest of the man page. I usually read the description first, and then look for an examples section, if one exists. This section provides what you're talking about. Unfortunately, many man pages don't have such a section. This tends to be true of GNU software, which favors info over man pages (don't get me started). When I took my Intro to Unix course at UML, the instructor (Gerry Poulin, who I think some of the DECies might know) told us the trick to reading man pages is to learn how to read them. The key is understanding how the information is presented. Read the sections that are appropriate to what you're trying to learn, and skim (or ignore) the rest. > One advantage of man pages is being able to pipe them into other > commands such as grep, whereas interactive help doesn't allow for pipes. I'm not really sure this is an advantage... You don't need to pipe man pages into grep to search them. On most Linux systems, `less' is the default pager for man pages, and it is perfectly capable of searching man pages. For those who may not know, most of the vi key commands that deal with navigation and searching work in less. Of course, you do need to know about the feature before you can use it... This is where book learning (and reading man pages) comes in. I would also like to point out that many distributions, and Red Hat in particular, DO come with printed manuals that are aimed at the newbie. I don't have a copy of them handy, but I remember them as being oriented at the new user and fairly well done. And for those who didn't BUY Red Hat, the manuals are (or at least were at one time) included on the CD in a reasonably intuitive directory (<cdroot>/docs or some such, IIRC). They can also be installed as rpms. Or at least they could last I still cared to have them... back around RH 6.1 IIRC. - -- Derek Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED] - --------------------------------------------- I prefer mail encrypted with PGP/GPG! GnuPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D Retrieve my public key at http://pgp.mit.edu Learn more about it at http://www.gnupg.org -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE8aZmtdjdlQoHP510RAgNXAJsGjI709kTRG0tuQLDwrMyFHAo7aQCfcfNA NH8OkyqEpXpS1fxx/eOoCF8= =wUCE -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ***************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the text 'unsubscribe gnhlug' in the message body. *****************************************************************
