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.
