One of those monumental days ........

Chris F.A. Johnson cfaj-uVmiyxGBW52XDw4h08c5KA at public.gmane.org
Wed Nov 9 06:18:05 UTC 2005


yOn Wed, 9 Nov 2005, Tim Writer wrote:

> "Walter Dnes" <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org> writes:
>
>>   - Give me a large manpage, and I'll use the "/" key to find what I'm
>>     looking for.
>
> Ever tried looking up something in the bash man page?  Say, a builtin like
> "set". It'll take you a while to find the "set" you're looking for.

     If you don't want to use the builtin help (help set), you can do:

sman bash ^SHELL\ BUILTIN\ COMMANDS  ## And a few PgDns


     My sman function is:

sman() {
    LESS="$LESS${2:+ +/$2}" man  "$@"
}


     If you use the man page more than a few times, you get to know the
     section headings and can go straight to them. Or you can get a
     list with:

man bash | grep '^[A-Z]'

     (Hmm... perhaps I'll write a little script to present a menu of
     the man page headings...)

[snip]
> In general, it's not so much the format that's the problem but the
> quality and coverage of the content. Unfortunately, most developers
> (myself included) prefer writing code to documentation and there are
> relatively few volunteers who write documentation.

     The bash man page is one of the best, but it requires careful
     reading in some spots.

-- 
     Chris F.A. Johnson                     <http://cfaj.freeshell.org>
     ==================================================================
     Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach, 2005, Apress
     <http://www.torfree.net/~chris/books/cfaj/ssr.html>
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