> On Thursday 29 December 2005 22:36, Les Mikesell wrote: >> On Thu, 2005-12-29 at 21:07, Gene Heskett wrote: >>>> It would greatly help if most of the man pages included examples >>>> of usage. >>> >>> Hear hear!! >> >> Often the man pages have examples of the way the author expected >> the program to be used. However, there's still a good chance >> that isn't exactly what you want to do with it. > > I submit to you all the manpages for bash. > > Paragraph after paragraph of explanation of this option and that option > in a quite verbose manner, and not a single actual example of a > command line, and the results it should return. That makes writing > even a 10 line bash script into an extended reading and re-reading > session with heavy use of the manpages builtin grep because its so > poorly organized that the complete answer may be in 3 or more places > scattered through it. And the chances of it doing what you wanted on > the first execution are slim to zip. Bash scripts can be made to do > litterally anything you need them to do, but... So I come to one of > these lists and ask for help, finally getting acceptable results in > 3-4 days, often using a method thats not at all clear in the manpages. > The help I have received on one list or another has often been far > more clearly and concisely stated than the manpages for bash that I > have printed out and bound, and read from end to end probably 30 times > now. > > I rest my case. I feel your pain, my friend. I've been scripting bash for quite a while. Maybe I can contribute something to this thread, here's my list of bookmarks for bash scripting: http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/toc.htm http://cfaj.freeshell.org/shell/ http://www.shelldorado.com/ http://home.comcast.net/~j.p.h/cus-faq.html http://sed.sourceforge.net/sed1line.txt http://www.student.northpark.edu/pemente/sed/sedfaq.html http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/faq/part1/ http://www.shelldorado.com/goodcoding/cmdargs.html http://www.macobserver.com/tips/macosxcl101/ http://www.wagoneers.com/UNIX/FIND/find-usage.html http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/bash/bashref.html http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/ ;
