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Comment by graemep

1 month ago

That is exactly the sort of thing I think could have been improved. We have very little at the moment - autocomplete and some help.

11 comments

graemep

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ndsipa_pomu  1 month ago

Along with the "-h,--help" options, an option to show common usage examples would be useful. I find it much easier to learn from an example as you can modify and build upon it. Otherwise, it's a case of skimming through the man page and then switching back and forth between the man page and the command that I'm writing. (This is most common with tools that I don't use all the time, yet have expert features such as "ffmpeg")

  • 1718627440  1 month ago

    > an option to show common usage examples would be useful.

    That's what the man page is supposed to be (and most do contain example) and why GNU wanted to split it into info (tutorials and exhausting documentation) and man (reference and examples).

    • ndsipa_pomu  1 month ago

      Yep, the examples on man pages are helpful, but I'd like a slimmed down option to just show the examples and a one-line description for the examples.

      I usually end up just doing a quick web search for the command if it's not one that I'm familiar with (i.e. where I have read the man page).

      An extreme example of my issue would be trying to find BASH examples of how to process a list of files - the man page on BASH is fairly lengthy.

      Meanwhile, Greg's wiki provides this example of processing mp3 files:

        while IFS= LC_ALL=C read -r -d '' file; do
    some command "$file"
  done < <(find . -type f -name '*.mp3' -print0)

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