On Mon, 25 Mar 2024, MC_Sequoia wrote:
"I was surprised to find < 15% of the command executables were
documented. Naturally I was hoping for something like 50% to 75%."
I'm starting a new thread from Randall's thread about man pages,
because I'm getting lost and confused with all the scripting and I'm
kind of stuck on one very simple common sense idea and that is, how
can anyone submit an executable file to Linux without documentation?
I will leave aside the fact that no one submits an executable file to
Linux; each distribution (Red Hat, Debian, etc) picks the executable
files to include with the Linux kernel.
Here's one scenario where several executable files have no
documentation. The Texinfo suite, usually accessed via /usr/bin/info,
includes a program called /usr/sbin/fix-info-dir. It's a shell script
that replaces missing menu items in info sections. The script has a
--help option, but no man page. It's there mostly for developers who
are writing info pages, not for users. Python's pydoc utility sort of
falls into this category too.
Similarly, the "less" pager distribution often includes a shell script
called lesspipe.sh. The latter has no man page, though its use is
documented in the main less man page.
There are other application suites, like git, that come with several
example or template executables; none has a man page and, honestly,
who would write a man page for a sample program?
Other program suites like sudo include, e.g., /usr/libexec/sudo/sesh,
which I can only imagine to be some sort of helper program for the
main sudo application, but sesh is otherwise undocumented. The same is
true of the grcat and pwcat utilities distributed with gawk. The
dovecot imap/pop server goes hog-wild in this manner!
--
Paul Heinlein
[email protected]
45°22'48" N, 122°35'36" W
