man man

Often when people are introduced to Unix, they are told the documentation is in 'man' and that typing 'man man' will teach them what they need to know to get started.

I just typed 'man man' because I was wanting to know if there was an option to skip straight to the section of a man page I was interested in rather than having to page through.

man man is almost totally incomprehensible to me, a unix user for over 20 years.

I don't see how ordinary people are expected to manage learning unix with instructions like 'man man will get you started'.

Devon Lanchester
Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Ordinary people are not expected to do so at all. Only people who want to stop being ordinary need ever get behind a shell prompt.

.
Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Maybe you should try "mount man"?

Alex
Wednesday, June 30, 2004

man man man?

Chris
Wednesday, June 30, 2004

% man: why did you get a divorce?
man:: Too many arguments.

% nice man woman
No manual entry for woman.


Which are almost as funny as

% [Where is my brain?
Missing ].

(More at http://web.ukonline.co.uk/eric.price/humour/hum0123.htm )

Wednesday, June 30, 2004

The only people I've heared saying to newbies that they should use man man have been academic wannabe dumbasses that are so narrow minded its sad. If UNIX required secret handshakes and black magic and woodoo they would be all happy, and proud themselves on their self proclaimed wizard sk1llz and genius.

Patrik
Wednesday, June 30, 2004

"If UNIX required secret handshakes and black magic and woodoo they would be all happy, and proud themselves on their self proclaimed wizard sk1llz and genius. "

You forgot facial hair ... and grants, definetly grants.

Just me (Sir to you)
Wednesday, June 30, 2004

I just sent away for my Lucky Astrology Unix Decoder Ring last week!  As soon as I get it, then I can be cool too!!!

anon
Wednesday, June 30, 2004

UNIX does have black magic: http://www.clueless.com/jargon3.0.0/deep_magic.html

Matthew Lock
Wednesday, June 30, 2004

% man: is windows documentation better than unix?
man:: Let me count the ways.

gambler
Wednesday, June 30, 2004

On the other hand there's Tkman which puts a TCL/Tk GUI on top of man pages.  Of course, you have to install the TCL/Tk libs first, but they have a lot of other nice utilities written for them.

Jack Squat
Wednesday, June 30, 2004

In my experience, I've never heard anyone say that "man man" is a good place to get started. Is this really a common practice?

I never heard that "man man" would provide any more information than the technical aspects of how to use the "man" command.

Bill Tomlinson
Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Well whether the advice giver says, "man man will get you started" or just explains what the man pages are and implies that they are sufficient to guide a new user through learning the system, the result is about the same.  And I've heard both recommendations plenty of times.

I've learned to value the man pages over the years and rely on them frequently, but for my first couple of forays into Linux I found them too arcane to be helpful for a newbie, whether we're talking about man man specifically or the rest of the body of man pages.

offMyMeds
Wednesday, June 30, 2004

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