as a professional sociotechnical problem solver I will join you on this fatal hill
like take the 4 types of documentation in diátaxis
man pages usually fulfill the reference need, and sometimes kind of that of how-to guides if you’re lucky and your local man has examples
but that leaves more than 50% of documentation needs lacking
and discoverability is atrocious – you have to already know that the command (or commands) you need exists and what it’s called
one of the most useful things I learned in a linux sysadmin course was apropos / man -k, which lets you search installed man pages by keyword. but hardly anyone else seems to know about it – I only learned of it because a teaching assistant mentioned it off hand! – and even then it only helps if you guess the right keyword for your problem
I think it should be the default if you don’t use parameters. A little usage help and the list of commands (with a “do you want to see the list of commands? (Y/n)” message)
as a professional sociotechnical problem solver I will join you on this fatal hill
like take the 4 types of documentation in diátaxis
manpages usually fulfill the reference need, and sometimes kind of that of how-to guides if you’re lucky and your localmanhas examplesbut that leaves more than 50% of documentation needs lacking
and discoverability is atrocious – you have to already know that the command (or commands) you need exists and what it’s called
one of the most useful things I learned in a linux sysadmin course was
apropos/man -k, which lets you search installedmanpages by keyword. but hardly anyone else seems to know about it – I only learned of it because a teaching assistant mentioned it off hand! – and even then it only helps if you guess the right keyword for your problemI am vexed by this situation
I think it should be the default if you don’t use parameters. A little usage help and the list of commands (with a “do you want to see the list of commands? (Y/n)” message)