One very important section number is 5 - it's for file formats. So if you forget the crontab format, you need to invoke `man 5 crontab` to read about it.
Depends. If one is aware of the meaning of section numbers, that "(5)" is very obviously suggesting that there is a file format named "crontab" which is documented. It's also pretty reasonable to suppose that the command and the file format of the same name are related.
A novice might miss the convention and the connection. Man pages are not quite novice material.
I can't count the number of times that following the trail laid out by 'SEE ALSO' sections a step or three has lead me to the exact thing that I never knew I needed to be using. Chasing those sections down is almost always well worth the three to ten minutes spent.
And, like, if one is expecting a man page to cover in detail everything even vaguely related to what it documents, and one doesn't feel one has ten minutes to spend reading things that people thought were important to bring to your attention... well, I guess one could go ask an LLM to slop out some related words. That'll probably take less than ten minutes, though correctness is not at all guaranteed.
If man was designed by someone with any taste at all it would at least give you a menu to select (1) crontab command, (5) crontab file format. Maybe we need a rewrite in Rust to fix that.
Why is it that the Rust community thinks that the solution to every flaw in an application is a rewrite in Rust?
My goodness. Man was written on a paper teletype.
https://imgur.com/a/kEkmRxx (link shows a screenshot of khelpcenter showing the different manpages available for crontab)
Incidentally, man --help on my machine shows "-k, --apropos equivalent to apropos", which isn't very useful. I know the two are equivalent, because they're on the same line of switches, what does it actually do?
With some further man digging, apropos is actually a separate program that looks through man page names/descriptions for the argument. Unless you run it with no arguments, in which case it just outputs "apropos what?" Instead of an actual error message like "No search term provided" or something
That's your hint to execute either 'man apropos' or 'man man'. Both tell you in detail what the flag and utility do.
You seem likely to be very disappointed in the '-h'/'-H' output of utilities from the BSD tradition. The output is often a list of all of the (almost always exclusively short) options presented as a sea of characters... and nothing else.
.\" Take this out and a Unix Daemon will dog your steps from now until
.\" the time_t's wrap around.
.Pp
You can tune a file system, but you cannot tune a fish.
It is a stylistic convention to always add this number to any reference to a function, even if there is only one definition.
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/idx/xcu.htm...
These would all be in section 1, if I am correct.
Run `apropos . | grep "(3)"`; you'll be surprised how many libraries come with man pages for their functions (e.g; curl).
Now I wonder if there are any IDEs that can automatically dial into these man pages and pull up documentation for functions?
apropos --sections=3 .
Also, have you ever seen the DOS Borland IDE context sensitive help UX?
I have one of those physical binders, a volume of Section 3 for an AT&T 3B2, in the software section of my library downstairs. A beautiful artifact in every respect, of the level of quality you would imagine in the manual for a machine that cost $15,000 in the 80s.
Step 2: Feel the urge to write an article about that
Writing down what you learn cements knowledge, and sharing what you write might help someone else.
Perhaps the modern version of "man" should be a program you can talk to.
"Hey <agent>, use `man` to help answer these questions about grep"
(discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27994194)
Discovered this in college when I was shoulder surfing a coworker who always used the username Tyler. When he typed shutdown I called it out, and he said, "wait, it doesn't do that for you? I always assumed it said that for everyone and just replaced the username!".
(For those of you too young to know, it's a reference to an Aerosmith song)
Haha! Adequate amount of fun was provided, please resume regular man activities.
They fell out of favor when people realized they were a security issue, because it was a code path that rarely got tested.
Proper code doesn't either, and yet there they are! The point is they added another attack surface, however small, and another code path that should be tested.
When people started to care about 100% test coverage, they started to disappear.
I dunno, "attack surface" to me means "facilitate opening/vulnerability somehow" and none of the easter egg code I've seen has done that. You have any concrete examples where a easter egg made possible a security vulnerability that wouldn't be possible otherwise?
But yes, another code path created by easter eggs that wasn't tested I've seen countless of times, but never been an issue, but maybe our easter eggs always been too small in scope for that.
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/144202/are-ther...
In Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, we had a hidden animation of Captain Kirk's toupee jumping off his head and running out of the room. It was caught before release and they made us take it out since no one wanted to piss off William Shatner.
Which means you need to usually make it explicit to call them (man --abba or something) than something that "surprises" the user.