Maybe the group who now owns the Linux trademark should forbid people from shipping crappy distros and mentioning "Linux" anywhere on their sites
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Maybe the group who now owns the Linux trademark should forbid people from shipping crappy distros and mentioning "Linux" anywhere on their sites
.Originally posted by: CTho9305
XP comes with "find", which is remarkably similar to grep but with a more intuitive name
Actually, grep is intuitive.... get regular expression. It's much more powerful than a simple "find" command.
Originally posted by: M00T
Originally posted by: CTho9305
XP comes with "find", which is remarkably similar to grep but with a more intuitive name
Actually, grep is intuitive.... get regular expression. It's much more powerful than a simple "find" command.
It's acutally "search globally for lines matching the regular expression, and print them." That said "get regular expression" is much easier to remember.
Wikipedia entry.
Nothinman
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My 2003 experience is extremely limited, but do the helpfiles cover every command on the system? On my Debian systems every command has a man page, even if it's just a short blurb about what the command's supposed to do. And I would be money that there's still instances where you can run 'somecommand /?' and it won't print out the 'undocumented' switches ala 'fdisk /mbr'.
Yep. They are very comprehensive. Much easier to use than man pages too.
fdisk is no longer included in xp/2003 but the replacement, diskpart is well documented...
That was actually one of the most asked for features that went into 2003.. command line to do everything you can do in the gui. Things are documented in the helpfiles and through a /? switch or in nested commands like diskpart from within the command itself.
From XP (5.1)
fdisk is no longer included in xp/2003 but the replacement, diskpart is well documented...
That was actually one of the most asked for features that went into 2003.. command line to do everything you can do in the gui. Things are documented in the helpfiles and through a /? switch or in nested commands like diskpart from within the command itself.
From XP (5.1)
Yes man pages are easy in the scenario you mention but so is "command /?".
Where man pages fall on their face is if you don't know what you are looking for ahead of time. That's where the hypertext of a windows helpfile really shines. Also having links embedded in the helpfile that take you to the actual application you need to use aren't bad either.
Where man pages fall on their face is if you don't know what you are looking for ahead of time. That's where the hypertext of a windows helpfile really shines. Also having links embedded in the helpfile that take you to the actual application you need to use aren't bad either.
Man pages provide more better bunches information than command /? (or command -h).
apropos and man -k make searching easy, and the SEE ALSO section at the bottom of the man page provides you with "links" to other man pages that may be useful. I read them online all the time (http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi) and follow those little links regularly.
What's the trick to get Windows help thingy to come up quickly? It always seems to take a long time when I try to use it.
Nothinman
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Man pages are supposed to be just for reference, they're not meant to be a full blown set of documentation. So if you don't know what you're looking for you should probably be reading the docs in /usr/share/doc/<packagename> or their website. And seperating the docs into dozens of pages and using hyperlinks to jump around in them sounds a bit like the info program that GNU keeps trying to promote, but no one really cares about info because the added features and complexity are pointless and usually cause more harm than good. And as n0c said, 'man -k' and the 'SEE ALSO' section of the man pages are usually 'good enough'.
I'm a big MS guy and thus far have not said anything negative in this "Linux Sucks" thread but comparing man pages to the 2003 helpfiles is ridiculous. I'm not going to come outright and say "Linux Sucks" but the man pages certainly do. You've just gotten good enough at your OS that the limited functionality they provide is now acceptable. If you had decent helpfiles this thread may never have been started.
Seriously look at em. It's like someone got stuck in the 70s when they wrote em and now that the precident is set no one wants to fix it.
And if man pages aren't supposed to be documentation then what documentation does Linux ship with? (Linux being used very generically here as an OS, not just a kernel).
n0c, Nothin. You know I got love for ya but the man pages have always made me laugh
Seriously look at em. It's like someone got stuck in the 70s when they wrote em and now that the precident is set no one wants to fix it.
And if man pages aren't supposed to be documentation then what documentation does Linux ship with? (Linux being used very generically here as an OS, not just a kernel).
n0c, Nothin. You know I got love for ya but the man pages have always made me laugh
Nothinman
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Since most of the GUI components do have a help system similar to the help files in Windows.I think part of the assumption is that someone reading man pages is already comfortable enough with the cli that they do make sense. And this thread wasn't started because man pages suck, it was started because SuSe had a problem with their QA, the man page they shipped didn't match the version of grep that they shipped.
As far as I'm concerned there's nothing to fix. Of course they're of varying quality because different people write them, but that would be true no matter what format in which they're presented.
As mentioned above Gnome and KDE apps both have help systems similar to the Windows HTML help crap. Additionally each package installs docs into /usr/share/doc/<packagename>, these depend a lot on the package though some are just a basic README, license file, changelog, etc and some have example config files, full html books, pdfs, etc.
And I have the same reaction in the opposite direction, the lack of anything like man pages on Windows makes me laugh. Or more accurately cry out in frustration when I can't find something I want. =)
Originally posted by: Smilin
I'm a big MS guy and thus far have not said anything negative in this "Linux Sucks" thread but comparing man pages to the 2003 helpfiles is ridiculous. I'm not going to come outright and say "Linux Sucks" but the man pages certainly do. You've just gotten good enough at your OS that the limited functionality they provide is now acceptable. If you had decent helpfiles this thread may never have been started.
Seriously look at em. It's like someone got stuck in the 70s when they wrote em and now that the precident is set no one wants to fix it.
And if man pages aren't supposed to be documentation then what documentation does Linux ship with? (Linux being used very generically here as an OS, not just a kernel).
n0c, Nothin. You know I got love for ya but the man pages have always made me laugh
Check out OpenBSD's man pages. They are the main source of documentation for users (as well as the official FAQ and mailing list archives, but the archives aren't on every system
). Hell, I use OpenBSD's man pages, FAQ, and mailing list archives when researching issues or software for other unix-like systems (primarily Solaris and Linux).I'm not denying that Microsoft's help functions are horrible (except that command /? is not a good source of detailed information, but neither is command -h generally), just that man pages aren't as bad as so many make them out to be. And that MS's help program is slow.
I can't compare anything to 2k3 though, my 180 trial ran out and I've gone to XP for Windows type stuff.
I can't speak for 2003 since we junked our NT servers for Linux, but I've never heard *anyone* brag about Windows help files before.
On linux, I'll try a man page.
On windows, I go straight to google.
On linux, I'll try a man page.
On windows, I go straight to google.
Yeah see all you guys are talking down at Windows helpfiles using your Win95/WinNT experience.
It's 2006 now people.
It's 2006 now people.
XP's help system is slow too, and Vista's is non-existant.
EDIT: HAHAHA! Someone turned off the system and support service (or whatever it was called on this machine).
Tried it again though and the help system came right up. First time that's happened. Usually I have to wait 30 seconds for it to come up... Maybe I'm not using enough of the 2GB of ram in this machine...
kamper
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That's the exact same logic that has graphics in kernel space on one operating system and not on another (and we're not here to debate the relative merits of those approaches). It's not like there aren't gui man page viewers that make full use of the mouse and hyperlinking. If anything, text based documentation is better because it can be used in both ways. What do you do if you only have command-line access to the machine?
As was pointed out, you're confusing content with presentation. You're the only one who is complaining about presentation. Maybe you'd like to show us how windows' help system prevents people from writing inaccurate documentation?
I think that most serious Linux users haven't realy used Windows since the Win9x days. At least not as the main operating system. They might use it for games and such, but that's it realy. I know I haven't.. even after being given a few free (and legal copies) of Windows XP pro and all the server editions of Windows 2000. I have no desire and see no need or any realy compelling features or whatnot to go back.
For a while now I've been wanting to check out Windows 2003 closely, but I don't go to school anymore and it's very hard to justify plopping down a few hundred dollars on a operating system that is less capable then one I can get for free that I know well just for the heck of it.
And sure man files suck. Everybody knows this and people have been complaining about it for what seems like centuries.
The GNU project knows this. They are the people that made your grep there. They prefer 'info' to man... which is another of their creations. This sort of thing is why they want it to be called 'GNU/Linux' rather then just 'Linux'. Almost the entire core OS from everything from basic shells to compilers and pretty much everything inbetween.
You see instead of saying 'Linux sucks' you'd go 'This GNU stuff is crap'. Then everybody would go 'Ah, silly use info instead of man, duh'.
Info has all the nice features. Hypertext, directory system, search system, etc etc. This has been around for years.
Thing is.. it's much worse then man files generally. Everybody who isn't a heavy emacs user (which is about 85% of all Linux users) thinks it's horrible.
But man files have a very serious advantage, and info for that matter... over Microsoft's help files.. They are useful over the command line. You see that 90% of the time your at your workstation.. working. If your working on a server or working on some machine it's very rare that you'd actually be sitting in front of it. It's also fairly rare that you'd have a GUI for it as well as you having all the same stuff installed on your workstation as your server. Hell, it's not uncommon for the machine your working with to be a in a different geographical location.
And while, sure, you have remote desktop and NX and such it's not the same thing. You'd have many machines involved that your working on. You'd ssh from one machine to the next, and over a days work you may end up running through several machines.
For this sort of thing then man files are sufficient.
If you want something fancier then just use info. It has all the features and such...
For a while now I've been wanting to check out Windows 2003 closely, but I don't go to school anymore and it's very hard to justify plopping down a few hundred dollars on a operating system that is less capable then one I can get for free that I know well just for the heck of it.
And sure man files suck. Everybody knows this and people have been complaining about it for what seems like centuries.
The GNU project knows this. They are the people that made your grep there. They prefer 'info' to man... which is another of their creations. This sort of thing is why they want it to be called 'GNU/Linux' rather then just 'Linux'. Almost the entire core OS from everything from basic shells to compilers and pretty much everything inbetween.
You see instead of saying 'Linux sucks' you'd go 'This GNU stuff is crap'. Then everybody would go 'Ah, silly use info instead of man, duh'.
Info has all the nice features. Hypertext, directory system, search system, etc etc. This has been around for years.
Thing is.. it's much worse then man files generally. Everybody who isn't a heavy emacs user (which is about 85% of all Linux users) thinks it's horrible.
But man files have a very serious advantage, and info for that matter... over Microsoft's help files.. They are useful over the command line. You see that 90% of the time your at your workstation.. working. If your working on a server or working on some machine it's very rare that you'd actually be sitting in front of it. It's also fairly rare that you'd have a GUI for it as well as you having all the same stuff installed on your workstation as your server. Hell, it's not uncommon for the machine your working with to be a in a different geographical location.
And while, sure, you have remote desktop and NX and such it's not the same thing. You'd have many machines involved that your working on. You'd ssh from one machine to the next, and over a days work you may end up running through several machines.
For this sort of thing then man files are sufficient.
If you want something fancier then just use info. It has all the features and such...
That's a pretty big pile of red herring arguments.
The only reason text only would be an advantage is if you were bound to a text only interface! That's not a problem in Windows.
When do you only have command line access to Windows? Recovery console? Hm. all commands are documented there.
I'm not confusing anything. I think *you* are confusing what I began responding to in the first place. I'm definately not griping about presentation, I'm griping about usability. Man pages suck. Awful stuff. Are you disagreeing with this statement or just being defensive about your OS of choice? If I was a *nix guy saying this you would agree I think (see Drag's post for instance). Don't confuse me bashing your man pages as bashing your OS. It's ok to admit they suck. Linus won't kick you out of any fan club
Nothinman
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No, you have the opposite problem since no SSH server or client is included by default. =)
I am disagreeing with this statement. Using 'man -k searchterm' and 'man command' is really simple and gets the job done. The only 'feature' of info that might be useful is the hyperlinks to jump between documents, but that's a really minor thing IMO.
I don't agree with drag's post either, he says that man pages suck but doesn't actually say why. Sure he lists a few extra features that info has over man, but most of them are crap and unnecessary IMO. And the existance of one thing, even if it does have more features, doesn't automatically mean the other sucks.
kamper
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Sure, but *nix isn't windows and there are servers without guis. I'm not saying windows needs text documentation, just that there's a very good reason to keep them around in *nix. Also, X or not, there's lots of times that ssh access is simply preferable to vnc or whathaveyou.
So far as I understand it, your problem with usability is a direct result of the presentation (text based interface). But this entire thread (and the reason "linux sucks") has nothing to do with how usable the man pages are. It has to do with how correct they are and windows has no inherent advantage there.
No, if windows documentation works for windows people then I think it's wonderful and if linux documentation doesn't work, then it's a big problem (and obviously it is in many distros).
Bash linux distributions all you want, I'm just arguing one fine point
For general purpose documentation, sure, they suck. But there are two good ways to alleviate this:It's ok to admit they suck. Linus won't kick you out of any fan club
-Every self respecting operating system should also have a more coherently organized handbook or at least a wiki if they want to push documentation out to their users.
-It's lovely when there is an online version that you can browse with nice scrolling and hyperlinks. Typing "man foo" in my browser address bar takes me to the openbsd man page for foo. Even long man pages are pretty tolerable in this format.
Things like shell scripting and the complete string formatting spec for printf are ridiculous to read in a shell because they're too big to be linear like a man page. But higher level documentation like that is not what we're debating. We are debating simple command syntax like arguments to grep. When you're on the commandline (as you obviously will be when using grep) and you want to know what flags you can use and what they generally mean, man pages are a fantastically quick way to figure it out. They're indispensable when you're logged into a remote machine via ssh if you don't have proper documentation for the operating system in question with you.
They're also pretty handy as c library functions documentation, provided that they don't pack too many things into one page (which can be a problem). A big benefit there is that you always know exactly where they are. If I'm programming on my powerbook, I don't have to know about some mac specific document viewer (and why would I want to fire it up anyway, when I've already got a bunch of Terminals open?). Then I can ssh into the school's linux box, where the code will eventually be run, and check the documentation in the exact same way, to verify that my code will run on both machines. Basically, because there is no common gui on *nix, a standard text based documentation format is great for moving acrosss platforms.
As for info, I'll admit I know very little about it. Here and there, when a man page is particularly lean and just says "See the info page" I'll fire it up, but I usually give up pretty quickly because it's not very intuitive. Like I said before, complex documentation is a nice place for online html documentation to step in.
(emphasis added)Originally posted by: Smilin
That's a pretty big pile of red herring arguments.
The only reason text only would be an advantage is if you were bound to a text only interface! That's not a problem in Windows.
When do you only have command line access to Windows? Recovery console? Hm. all commands are documented there.
I'm not confusing anything. I think *you* are confusing what I began responding to in the first place. I'm definately not griping about presentation, I'm griping about usability. Man pages suck. Awful stuff. Are you disagreeing with this statement or just being defensive about your OS of choice? If I was a *nix guy saying this you would agree I think (see Drag's post for instance). Don't confuse me bashing your man pages as bashing your OS. It's ok to admit they suck. Linus won't kick you out of any fan club
I think you're the first one who threw in a red herring. This thread began because someone packaged documentation that did not match the version of the program. That has nothing to do with the format or content or any other property of the documentation; the problem happened in quality assurance. This could just as easily have happened to Windows Help files.
Then, you say something about man pages looking like they came from the 70's. You may need to look up the history of troff(1), but either way, you do seem to fail to perform the distinction and/or separation between content and presentation, which we regard as important.
What exactly is your specific gripe with man pages? If they are not treated as full documentation, but instead as something like an extended /?/--help/-h, they work very well IMO. Unfortunately, sometimes both users and developers treat them as full docs, so users only look there or developers either cram as much into the man system as possible, or perhaps nothing at all.
As for Windows not having a text interface, some things are much easier with a text interface. Anything I can do locally at the command line, I can do remotely and on multiple machines simultaneously. You can't say that about a graphical interface.
Well you have to realise that I am comming from a position were ALL documentation that I've ever seen pretty much sucks.
It's just there are differing degrees of suckiness based on how actually usefull and used something is.
Man files are a bit of a misnomer. They aren't usefull manuals.. they are fine for quick reference. For them to be real manuals they would have include more usefull terminology, some tutorials, and especially examples of the command with various options being run with samples of expected output.
It's to the point now were most commands are complex enough that when you try to run commands from the information provided in the man files and they fail it's next to impossible to tell if it's your fault or if the command failed in certain ways. Often it's difficult to tell what a command is actually used for based on the man file.
And Man file format is doubly screwed because if you actually make the file long enough to provide a usefull manual then it becomes so long that it's almost impossible to comprehend well and is less usefull for quick reference. For instance a very well done, but fairly useless-as-a-manual is the mplayer's man file. Searching around that for commands or keywords makes it difficult to figure out in what context that paticular option is usefull for.
On the other hand.. even though man files, by their nature, are inherently limited by their format they are still quite usefull. I use man files all the time and they help me alot.
What I find most usefull in Linux for documentation is a combination of a good man file and html-based documentation (not nessicarially online either... in the /usr/share/doc/ directory is a great place for that). That is the best that I've ever seen.
I much prefer manpages over Windows's documentation, but I'll admit I haven't used 2K3.
I don't care for info pages either for that matter.
Though I won't argue that some manpages suck, but in my case, they've generally been far and few between.
But as n0b said, look at OpenBSD's manpages, they're by far the best documentation I've ever seen, in any format, far eclipsing both Linux manpages and Windows helpfiles in usefulness.
I don't see why I'd want bigass HTML files when I can have simple text files instead, but then again, I've never been a big fan of nice looking docs to begin with, always been more of a .txt fan so to speak
I don't care for info pages either for that matter.
Though I won't argue that some manpages suck, but in my case, they've generally been far and few between.
But as n0b said, look at OpenBSD's manpages, they're by far the best documentation I've ever seen, in any format, far eclipsing both Linux manpages and Windows helpfiles in usefulness.
I don't see why I'd want bigass HTML files when I can have simple text files instead, but then again, I've never been a big fan of nice looking docs to begin with, always been more of a .txt fan so to speak
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