when do you usually use the man page for a complex command line tool to answer a question you have?

[ori@hj.9fs.net]

I voted 'first' because it's close enough; it's usually second after '-?'

(-? is not be a valid argument in many programs, but most dump their usage on an invalid argument, and it's easier than typing --help)

[master_squinter@infosec.exchange]

@b0rk
I tend to look for examples close to what I want to do, or tutorials. I would love if man pages were more consistent in giving clear examples for common use cases. This is much easier to parse quickly than detailed explanations.

[matthieu@mastodon.weber.fi.eu.org]

@b0rk for rsync, find or ls I use the man page. For ffmpeg or imagemagick I use duck duck go

[csgordon@discuss.systems]

@b0rk my experience is that I can often figure out what I need from the man page in one of 3 ways:
- often the first paragraph(ish) co-workers whatever I was confused about
- the EXAMPLES section (usually near the end) often has exactly the example I'd want
- often searching the man page ('/' to search, 'n' for next result) for keywords finds me what I need (another option) pretty fast

I'm skewed towards this from years of offline computer use (work on trains with crappy/no wifi, though it started with an offline desktop in my room in high school before wifi was a thing), but also reinforced by recent nonsense in both AI summaries and keyword-spamming sites...

[ianthetechie@fosstodon.org]

@b0rk other = on FreeBSD I have found the documentation pretty useful for most commands. On Linux, much less so.

[neilk@xoxo.zone]

@b0rk Yestwrday I wanted to use exiftool to strip all tags from an image. Couldn’t easily find it in the man page so I piped it to an AI and it spat out the answer. I’m not sure if this was better, or more ecological. But Google was going to give me an AI summary anyway amidst AI slop posts so why not skip the middleman

[qkslvrwolf@mastodon.social]

@b0rk One thing, and I don't know that this is solveable or maybe it was supposed to be solved by info pages but those were hard to memorize how to use, is learning the capabilities of a tool like...up front and at the top.

It's so hard to find the ingredients I need to concoct the correct incantation from man pages, even when I've done the thing with the tool before.

And sometimes you find things that SEEM like what you need but aren't.

[minkiu@mastodon.social]

@b0rk I agree with the sentiment, and I think that's why I installed tldr.sh again recently 🥲 granted that's far less in depth that what is provided by the man pages, but examples are concise.

[renedario@raphus.social]

@b0rk i like to look first and then search for examples elsewhere. otherwise my search may not be relevant

[chaos_99@fosstodon.org]

@b0rk I'd say I'd indeed look at the man page first. I've still voted "other", as I immediately turn away if it doesn't give a usage example in the first few lines.
I need to know if it's the right tool for the job, and only very few man pages declare what it does properly. I often need stackoverflow or blogs for that.
Then I return regularly to the man page to look up syntax of what I already know is there.

[ryanparsley@mastodon.social]

@b0rk I have a lingering guilt about not going to man pages first, but often a blog post has been better crafted than the friendly manual. Not all manuals but enough to encourage an antipattern in search first.

I totally agree with your motivation to address/revaluate that.

[rhold@norden.social]

@b0rk i remember this: when i learned about man and started using it, the stuff i wanted to know usually was on page 5 (quick reference / parameters). But i always forget that so it felt frustrating and abandoned them.

Instead I use --help command options. I only go to man when i want to learn the full and long version. But sometimes I do.

[tmcfarlane@toot.community]

@b0rk I generally go to `--help` first, and then a man page, often looking for the EXAMPLE section.

[djfiander@code4lib.social]

@sgharms @b0rk Same here. BSD documentation is usually very good, and complex commands usually have examples that cover the common cases.

Linux man pages, on the other hand, are usually crap.

[sandzwerg@chaos.social]

@b0rk usually I'd first look at --help, then web search, then man page. If I know it's a certain option and I just don't remember the name or how to use it it might be --help, man page then web search.

[kholerik@social.tchncs.de]

@b0rk Depends on the tool. You included --help, which I use more often than man. For git I prefer the internet, because it's too complex and I usually need a combination of options. For others I prefer --help or man. Just today I did that for adduser.

[jssfr@zombofant.net]

@b0rk I'm the kind of person who enjoyed reading man pages for leisure.

I read through the entirety of the rsync man page to compose my own favourite rsync invocation once.

The only tools where I resort to web search are shells, because their man pages are really hard to navigate (finding documentation for `read` in the bash man page is ... a nightmare).

Web search is often imprecise and as you note, has gotten so much worse that I am glad I never fully relied on it.

[enhancedscurry@mastodon.social]

@b0rk I gave up on groff so long ago that I forgot to try using an LLM to create a man page from HeaderDoc and Markdown. I'll have to give that a shot sometime.

[massimolauria@mathstodon.xyz]

@b0rk I guess if I am doing stuff on the terminal, the terminal it's the first place I look for help, so --help, man pages, and tldr. My gateway drug to Linux was DJGPP on DOS, and I was using quite a lot the info pages there, even a decade before adopting Emacs. I know Info gets a bad rap, and I admittedly not use it anymore, but I liked that it was giving way more information than a man page, often with tutorial like spirit,

[b0rk@social.jvns.ca]

@RyanParsley to be clear for me i'm mostly interested in figuring out if the man pages can become _better_ so that using them is actually a good experience, not accepting a bad experience