Comment by JdeBP
8 years ago
And as someone who, even nowadays, still points to the commercial manual pages for SCO Unix, HP/UX, AIX, Solaris, and suchlike, oftentimes for things that the GNU and BSD manual pages simply do not cover, I can tell you that you are quite wrong.
* https://manpages.debian.org/stretch/coreutils/ls.1.en.html
As can be seen, the commercial manual pages are not worse, and are indeed in several aspects better than the GNU one. The same is pretty much true of the non-GNU free operating systems (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Illumos) as well.
Notice that ...
* ... only the HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Illumos, and OpenBSD manual pages have examples (quite apposite considering the headline for this discussion)
* ... only the HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, and Illumos manual pages explain that output falls into three basic forms
* ... only the Solaris, Illumos, and FreeBSD manual pages actually explain in detail the configuration of the colour scheme (HP-UX, AIX, and OpenBSD not having a colour scheme mechanism, in fairness)
* ... only the HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Illumos, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD manual pages explain what the characters output by the -F option actually signify
* ... only the HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Illumos, and FreeBSD manual pages explain that the time format used in -l changes according to how long ago the timestamp was (an odd removal for OpenBSD, considering that OpenBSD ls does the same thing)
... and so on.
This, so much this. Having only transitioned into RHEL from Solaris in the latter 1/4 of my career, I still hark back to Solaris man pages and to this day, on Linux I will do -
man foo
/EXAMPLES
And frequently find what I find, if there are any at all, very lacking compared to Solaris.
I have often thought I and others who complain about this should get involved in working on these man pages and improve this situation.
Note that the GNU ls manpage is just `ls --help` in manpage format, with a "SEE ALSO" section at the bottom which tells you where the real documentation is.
Well, that was my memory going back to 2000. It has been a while since I bothered to look into them.
I remember having to go into the official documentation available on the HP, IBM and Sun web sites to find usable information, instead of just going through man pages.