In a message dated: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 16:08:21 EST
"Mansur, Warren" said:
>One problem I see with man pages is that they throw off the newbie user
>by putting every possible option at the top. If a new user sees this,
>they will probably be as confused as ever:
Well, yes, but I often find that people's problems with reading man
pages is that they don't know how. Why? They never ran 'man man'
which clearly states:
The following conventions apply to the SYNOPSIS section
and can be used as a guide in other sections.
bold text type exactly as shown.
italic text replace with appropriate argument.
[-abc] any or all arguments within [ ] are optional.
So, for this one person reading the tar man page, all they needed to
know was that all those things at the top were *options*.
Every now and then I hear this argument that "man pages stink and there
must be a better way!"
Why? They've worked great for over 30 years. At one time I was a
newbie and didn't have a clue about Unix, but I got through by
reading man pages, asking questions on mailing lists and usenet, and
surfing the web. If I can do it, anyone can, as long as they're
patient and willing to roll up their sleeves and read!
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