Hi Walter, > Man pages are not tutorials or complete manuals
Yes they are, or should be. They used to be. I learnt Perl 4 from perl(1). Back then it was a single long man page, well-written by an experienced Unix hand, Larry Wall. I learnt ed and sed the same way many years before that. And lex, yacc, etc. There was no Internet access, no Usenet access. There was _The Unix Programming Environment_ which, coming from K&R, was how I learnt Unix existed. Books on Unix meant a train journey to a specialist university bookshop. Later at work, Sun's printed man pages and a volume on papers were read cover to cover. They were how Unix was learnt by many because the man pages aimed to be complete references. GNU has a lot to answer for in ditching man pages. Debian have a policy of providing them, which is good, but they're often just a list of options, --help-like, to tick a `no man page' bug report. > Seriously guys, you need a big dose of Common Sense. Your tone comes across as offensive on this polite mailing list. It detracts from any argument you may wish to make. Cheers, Ralph.
