Talk:man page

Template man page

Are there templates to link directly to the man page of a program, like say http://man.cx/ip%288%29 or http://linux.die.net/man/8/ip for — Preceding unsigned comment added by Semsi Paco Virchow (talk • contribs) 08:29, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, although there's probably a better place to ask for editing help than a talk page. Guy Harris (talk) 10:05, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Thank you! Semsi Paco Virchow (talk) 14:41, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Do we really need citations?

Man is a self-explanatory thing here, and you can actually use man to figure out how to use man. I don't really think citations are needed unless you cite your console.

Folddoc

The original external link to the Folddoc man pages (that don't seem to be available)

• Internet gateway to Linux's man command

Analogous commands

The man command is analogous to the help command in the command shells of DOS, OS/2 and Microsoft Windows.

I don't think this is correct. The help command in DOS/Windows (and I expect OS/2, although I'm not personally familiar w/ it) only provides help for built-in commands - analogous to the help command in most *nix shells. Documentation for 3rd-party commands is never available via the help command in DOS/Windows. The man command & man pages are more like a PDF viewer & PDF User Manuals included by some 3rd-party programs installed on DOS/Windows. To me, 'analogous' indicates stronger/more similarities between man and help than actually exist. Beolach (talk) 05:53, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. man has nothing significant in common with the DOS-style help command. I am being bold and removing the misleading claim. 87.194.117.80 (talk) 01:11, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

Titles

Someone needs to link manual page to Unix manual, since manual page is what I call them in conversation, I can't be the only one that expands "man". 65.95.124.5 06:36, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

Done. Golwengaud 20:47, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

I still don't see why the man pages are actually called "on-line manuals". Where those manuals only availible online back in 1971?? Now they are delivered with every UNIX distribution, so why do they continue to call them "on-line" manual pages? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.126.42.203 (talk) 11:57, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

On-line as opposed to dead-tree, I believe. EdC (talk) 01:38, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Yes, EdC is correct here. Guy Harris (talk) 12:12, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

manual page sections

Shouldn't they be called categories? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.169.238.182 (talk) 06:14, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

They aren't. man 8 gets (Alternatively, what manual page do you want from section 8?) BioTube (talk) 21:40, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Repositories and Alpha order

Maybe it's me, maybe I'm the only pedantic guy here, but I seem to be a lone editor when I attempt to place these in alpha order of title. Someone, anonymous IP based, keeps promoting their favourite much higher in the list and I keep putting it back. Since this is a single person moving things around I'm guessing we have a silent consensus, but it would be good to have another pedant police this, too. Fiddle Faddle (talk) 09:02, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

Navigation

The information in Navigation isn't really anything to do with man pages per se; it's a feature of the pager used to display man pages.

Presumably, those instructions are for less; this should be noted. Those with alternative pagers (for example, more, which is probably the default on non-GNU-influenced Unix systems) will not be able to use the navigation commands mentioned. -- pne (talk) 10:44, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

mantopdf

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# usage example: ./mantopdf man
# should :-) create man.pdf in /tmp
man -t ${1} > /tmp/${1}.ps
gs -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=/tmp/${1}.pdf /tmp/${1}.ps
rm /tmp/${1}.ps

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.116.75.194 (talk) 18:42, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

Manpages suck: Lack of example usage

Compared to the help system in DEC VMS, the unix manpages are difficult to use and understand, mainly due to a lack of example command/function usage in the various subject matter. Examples tend to be quicker and easier to digest than pages of long verbose text on parameters and syntax.

But, it's hard to state in the article that manpages tend to lack examples, other than to cite extensively verbose manpages which lack any examples, I guess. :-) DMahalko (talk) 13:28, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

Article for man system per se

Perhaps there should exist a page on the man system, rather than the man page (the content of which would be encompassed by the former)? i.e., analogous to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Info_(Unix). Rnabioullin (talk) 23:00, 19 March 2012 (UTC)

History of Linux man

To make the caption of the opening screenshot a bit more precise, I did a little research, and found the following:

• It appears to be the same version of man as on my NAS, which runs Ubuntu.
• It's the same version on another machine I have access to which runs Fedora.
• According to man man, this version is maintained today by the Debian project, but was first written in 1990. This means it predates Linux, the first version of which appeared in November 1991.
• It is evidently not the first version of the man utility, as this Wikipedia article mentions earlier ones.
• Unlike most of the historically standard Linux userland, it is not part of the GNU project. GNU prefers Info pages instead.
• I couldn't find out what system Linux man was originally written for. We could ask its original author, John W. Eaton (now best known for GNU Octave), but I don't think such communication would be considered a reliable source.

Hairy Dude (talk) 13:21, 11 February 2018 (UTC)