On 09/09/2013 03:27 PM, Alex Esplin wrote:
It's a never-ending cycle between people discovering that they don't know
something, being told to RTM, not understanding TM, looking for a
translation layer (like the website in question) which helps them for a
while, realizing that the translation layer isn't complete, realizing that
somewhere along the way they have gained the ability to learn from man
pages, creating a new translation layer, etc., etc...
Explainshell raised to questions for me:
1) Do I really want some unwashed site on the internets knowing what
shell commands I might use in my environment?
2) Can man already do this?
At first I thought it would be great if man could return some subsection
of the manpage, especially for huge pages like bash's that seem
impossible to jump to the right section when you need it (what's the
test syntax again, and the syntax difference for lexical and integer
comparison?). I just can't jump to the spot I need quickly. And I
could see only that one esoteric option on the same terminal without
losing context of what I'm trying to do. I'm ignoring of course, the
normal practice of having 2 terminals open. Sometimes, you don't want to
ssh to the server again, just for a program/version-matching man page.
Then I thought, "Wait, one task, do it well. This is grep's job". So I
tried piping man output to grep and sure enough, it didn't force the
output to the pager. Yay! Everything I wanted, and never thought to
try before.
;-Daniel
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