On Thursday 29 December 2005 20:40, Kam Leo wrote: >On 12/29/05, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> On Thu, 2005-12-29 at 09:07, Charles Howse wrote: >> > My first experience with Linux was when I bought a book about >> > Linux that contained Red Hat 5. Didn't know what a man page was >> > until I finished reading the book. Today I am still dumbfounded >> > sometimes by the lack of help contained in a man page, or by the >> > over abundance of terms that I have to stop and look up, then try >> > and understand whether that applies to my situation. >> >> You really have to understand what the shell does to every >> command line before starting a program before reading other >> man pages. The concepts of i/o redirection, wildcard filename >> expansion, and environment variable setting are not repeated >> in the man pages for every program even though they may be >> useful or even necessary. Man pages are meant to be a reference, >> not a tutorial. A tutorial should be a separate volume since >> you normally only need it once and never want to see it again >> while you may need the reference for obscure options later. >> Unfortunately, a tutorial doesn't exist for some programs >> you might want to use. >> >> -- >> Les Mikesell >> lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx > >It would greatly help if most of the man pages included examples of > usage. Hear hear!! -- Cheers, Gene People having trouble with vz bouncing email to me should add the word 'online' between the 'verizon', and the dot which bypasses vz's stupid bounce rules. I do use spamassassin too. :-) Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2005 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.
