On 11/29/06, Stewart Stremler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
begin quoting Todd Walton as of Wed, Nov 29, 2006 at 06:57:25PM -0600:
> On 11/28/06, Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >The 'apropos' command is quite useful if you think you know what you
> >might be looking for in terms of manpages.
>
> You'd think it would be. I like having it around, but I can't really
> think of anytime that I've used it and it's helped me. I always type
> 'apropos something' and I get back a buttload of results in which my
> search term is only something embedded within a larger word (e.g.
> "six" in "posix") or programmer-friendly / user-unfriendly stuff, or
> perl pods. I can't think of anytime that I've found something using
> apropos.
I have, although I can't remember which of the many times I've used
it what I was looking for.
The "embedded in larger word" is annoying -- I use grep -v to trim
down the list (e.g., "apropos foo | grep -v TCL_").
I also tend to use apropos to give me some pages where I then go
and look at the SEE ALSO section. Apropos may not give me what I
want, but it often gives me enough to track down what I needed.
> As for the ntpd being man 8 or man 1, why would there be this
> difference? Most of you are using a Red Hat derivative, so this could
> be just a distro difference. Or maybe the whole world does it one
> way, and only Gentoo is different. Or... ?
I don't know why it would be a difference for ntp; for other things,
sometimes the manpage for something in one section obscures the manpage
in another section, and getting a list of all the manpages, including
sections, can be useful.
It's an intersection of different cultures. Some distro's put
administrative man pages in Section 8. Some don't distinguish between
admini and user programs.
The person who developed ntp has a thing about man pages, he doesn't
like them and he writes his documentation in HTML. Others take his
stuff and reformat it into classical man pages.
Some people who write man pages haven't read the documentation on how
to write a man page (man 7 man) and manage to screw up the data that
goes into making the "apropos" data base. Especially Larry Wall, with
his perl pod. Its really quite a mess, with accretions over two or
three decades.
carl
--
carl lowenstein marine physical lab u.c. san diego
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