Man Pages Thoughts

Bill Moran wmoran at potentialtech.com
Thu Aug 19 12:50:18 UTC 2004


Anthony Duerr <duerra at pushitlive.net> wrote:

> Greetings,
> My thoughts are concerning the man pages.  I don't know if this is the 
> perfect group to mail this to, but it seems to be as close as I could get.
> 
> Anyway, a thought occured to me this morning when reading through some 
> documentation.  It would be great to see an "Examples" section in the 
> man pages.  Often times the prototypes are difficult to read or 
> understand because of their length, option depth, etc.  An "Examples" 
> area in the man pages would allow the man creator to put in a couple of 
> the more commonly used prototypes examples in to get a user started on 
> the right track.
> 
> Granted, this would mostly be beneficial to newer users like me, but it 
> would save quite a bit of frustration when trying to process the vast 
> array of different commands in my mind.
> 
> I'm interested in your thoughts!

As already stated, many man pages do contain an examples section.  This
section is optional.

If you could point out which man pages are lacking examples, it's likely
that you could get some folks motivated to add an examples section to
them.

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com



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