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
