[TriLUG] Promotions for Installfests

Jeremy P jeremyp at pobox.com
Thu May 16 17:48:02 EDT 2002


On Thu, 16 May 2002, Jon Carnes wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
> >     While I'm at it, I want to speak on the topic of "laziness" vs. "lack
> of
> > knowledge" vs. "finding a needle in a haystack". Whenever I attempt to try
> > and find something in one of those "Man" files I always feel like I'm
> > searching for the proverbial "needle in a haystack".
> 
> man -k <keyword> |grep <another_keyword>

Or just man "program" and use the keyboard controls of the pager (usually
"less") -- for example the / command to search for a string/regexp.

But I agree that some man pages are better than others.  I like the ones
where the most common/necessary options are listed first, then followed by
the complete listing of every option under the sun.

One of the GNU things that I *absolutely detest* is the movement to remove
stuff from man pages, and only include documentation in the bloated "info"
pages.  The GNOME help browser is okay for reading infopages -- IF you
happen to be in X. There's no way to read the info pages from the command
line!  (Unless you use emacs or something, which I refuse to do just to
read some friggin documentation!)

--Jeremy




More information about the TriLUG mailing list