> <sf9afk$q7c$1@dont-email.me> <sf9heo$a6v$1@dont-email.me>
On 14.08.2021 at 22:52, William Unruh scribbled:

> On 2021-08-14, Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:
>
> > apropos 'action name' | less
> >
> > as an aid to finding the command they want and than
> >
> > man commandname
>
> Unfortunately man is really good for reminding someone what various
> things mean, but is pretty bad at teaching anyone how to use the
> command. A much much larger section for each man page with explicity
> examples would go a long way to making "man" useful for newbies (and
> oldies as well).

True, but this is what the GNU "info" command was (supposedly) intended
for. Well, that, and a more markup-style browsing experience, with
embedded links to other locally installed pages.

But then again, not all distributions install "info", and conversely,
I have already come across a distribution -- I seem to remember that it
was an earlier release of either PCLinuxOS or Mageia, but I'm not sure
anymore -- that installed the "info" pages by default but not the "man"
pages. And that was odd, because every UNIX system should at the very
least have "man" installed.

On my Manjaro system here, I have both "man" and "info" installed. The
latter did not come installed by default, but I either way find myself
looking far more at "man" pages than at "info" pages, as the "info"
system is actually quite bulky and a bit overkill -- sort of like the
difference between the simplicity of how the original GRUB worked and
the complexity of how GRUB2 works.

--
With respect,
= Aragorn =