When reading a manpage for complex tools like rsync, or find, often there are options that imply several other options. Or like with wget the manpage will recommend a several options together for a certain situation. So consider this excerpt:

… Actually, to download a single page and all its requisites (even if they exist on separate websites), and make sure the lot displays properly locally, this author likes to use a few options in addition to -p:

wget -E -H -k -K -p http://<site>/<document>

At that point interested readers are essentially driven to do four separate searches on that manpage to chase down each of those options. So I hit: HOME / -E. Got lucky because the first match just happened to be the -E option and not chatter about “Content-Encoding”.

Then what? I forgot all options I need to search for and lost my starting place, so I had to browse/search back to where I was to learn that I next need to search for -H. Then I hit: HOME / -H. It brings me to an irrelevant match on “non-HSTS-compliant”. So I must hit / ENTER many times until I reach the right position. Searching for -k is tedious too. …And so on…

With rsync the -a: “archive mode is -rlptgoD (no -A,-X,-U,-N,-H)”. Rsync is not a disaster though as they took care to summarize all options with a one-liner in one place.

Anyway, unless I am missing a trick¹, it seems there must be a lot of time waste with users having to jump around using a dicey search mechanism prone to false positives.

¹ In the course of writing this rant, I discovered I could search the rsync man page by doing /-a\>, which at least skips past many false hits by specifying a word boundary. Still more tedious than it has to be though.

  • toynbee@lemmy.world
    11·
    3 days ago

    It’s not exactly what you’re describing, but you can grep man output:

    man wget | grep -A 3 -- -E
  • azdle@news.idlestate.org
    10·
    4 days ago

    Be the change you want to see in the world?

    I’ve always thought it would be interesting to have a shell that can (semi-?)automatically expand short flags into long flags for you.

    • LibreMonk@linkage.ds8.zoneOP
      1·
      15 hours ago

      Glad to verify my click bait worked. A doc once told me the pinky toe is getting increasingly smaller and will one day go away. So the next notable evolution may be 4 toes… 2 toenails less to clip!

      I suppose UIs will evolve away from keyboards faster than we evolve to have more fingers.

  • Ŝan@piefed.zipEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    man is fantastic, but I agree þat þe pager could be better. Þere’s enough information in þe roff format for smarter tools, but it’s only used for formatting. An ideal tool would parse þe source, extract navigation information (like, building an index would be trivial), and þen boþ render and provide navigation aids.

    As long as it didn’t get as complex as GNU info; þat’s more trouble þan it’s worþ.

    Great idea for a utility project.