Number in man page titles e.g. sleep(3)

https://lalitm.com/til-number-in-man-page-titles-e-g-sleep-3/

by thunderbong • 4 months ago

127 84 4 months ago

lalitm.com

LtWorf3• 4 months ago

Step 1: Read `man man`

Step 2: Feel the urge to write an article about that

sakjur• 4 months ago

I admire people who do that.

Writing down what you learn cements knowledge, and sharing what you write might help someone else.

Stratoscope• 4 months ago

Is there a man man man article that will explain how to read man man?

bombcar2• 4 months ago

The full documentation for man is maintained as a Texinfo manual. If the info program is properly installed at your site, the command

              info man

Ah that crap is/was so rage inducing!

semiquaver• 4 months ago

Ideally, read or write while listening to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Man

amelius2• 4 months ago

Confession. I think I haven't read manpages since stackoverflow and certainly not since LLMs.

Perhaps the modern version of "man" should be a program you can talk to.

nicman23• 4 months ago

i have made llms read manpages, it is great lol

xigoi• 4 months ago

Please no. I want to read the manual without having to talk to anything.

Normal_gaussian• 4 months ago

It's called Claude. Or Gemini-cli. Or any other agent capable of running man.

"Hey <agent>, use `man` to help answer these questions about grep"

johannes1234321• 4 months ago

That may "answer" a specific question. And all llms can do as they include manpages in training data (and any Agentic thing can search) however the value in reading documentation is that one can find different angles by learning about different options, which allow tontackle problems from a different perspective. The answer to a question is constrained by assumptions which are part of the question.

amelius2• 4 months ago

My experience with LLMs is that they often give me different angles that I didn't think of.

LtWorf3• 4 months ago

How do you think llms reply to you?

kykat• 4 months ago

I looked up what the numbers mean a couple of times, but always forget it immediately

burnt-resistor3• 4 months ago

Section meaning varies somewhat widely by *nix flavor.

mjlee• 4 months ago

If you like man trivia (and why else would you be reading this?) you could check out the top comment at https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man...

(discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27994194)

porise• 4 months ago

Reading this makes me wonder if Easter eggs are ever appropriate for something as ubiquitous as man.

bombcar2• 4 months ago

Easter eggs are always appropriate but it is imperative (and important) to understand how they could affect anything and everything.

Which means you need to usually make it explicit to call them (man --abba or something) than something that "surprises" the user.

embedding-shape3• 4 months ago

Personally I think ubiquitous software is even more important to have Easter eggs, because they're the most widely distributed, and we want as much joy as we could possibly have, before you know.

jedberg4• 4 months ago

Almost everything had an easter egg in it back in the day. When computing was more fun and less serious.

They fell out of favor when people realized they were a security issue, because it was a code path that rarely got tested.

throwanem3• 4 months ago

It should make you wonder instead about the appropriateness of testing over man(1) output, I suppose unless you're actually generating the format for use as man(1) input, in which case congratulations on your functional tests doing their job!

qiine• 4 months ago

"The developer of the man-db, Colin Watson, decided that there was enough fun and the story won't get forgotten"

Haha! Adequate amount of fun was provided, please resume regular man activities.

jedberg4• 4 months ago

Another fun related one: If your username is Tyler and you run shutdown, instead of the usual message it will say "Oh, good morning Mr. Tyler, going down?"

Discovered this in college when I was shoulder surfing a coworker who always used the username Tyler. When he typed shutdown I called it out, and he said, "wait, it doesn't do that for you? I always assumed it said that for everyone and just replaced the username!".

(For those of you too young to know, it's a reference to an Aerosmith song)

hulitu5• 4 months ago

This was removed years ago from sysvinit, for political reasons.

cozzyd• 4 months ago

A great innovation over simple AB testing

gerikson2• 4 months ago

(... less common section numbers)

One very important section number is 5 - it's for file formats. So if you forget the crontab format, you need to invoke `man 5 crontab` to read about it.

linsomniac3• 4 months ago

... because if you do `man crontab` you get section 1, which does not document the crontab fields.

IshKebab8• 4 months ago

That is incredibly stupid. A documentation system designed by someone who doesn't understand how people use documentation.

If man was designed by someone with any taste at all it would at least give you a menu to select (1) crontab command, (5) crontab file format. Maybe we need a rewrite in Rust to fix that.

voidUpdate4• 4 months ago

In fact, the only reference to crontab(5) is in the SEE ALSO section (on my version anyway), but that doesn't say why you might want to see crontab(5), just that it exists. That is spectacularly useless

driftcoder• 4 months ago

man -k crontab is the real trick here. shows both sections so you don't have to already know the number exists.

PhilipRoman• 4 months ago

Interestingly, the section doesn't actually have to start with a number. TCL man pages use the 'n' section and 'man' resolves them just fine despite the ambiguity. Conversely, manpage names can also start with numbers, although this is rare (I found only one such example: man 30-systemd-environment-d-generator)

chasil• 4 months ago

The POSIX standard manual pages for the utilities can be found here:

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/idx/xcu.htm...

These would all be in section 1, if I am correct.

s20n• 4 months ago

For me man(3) is the most interesting of them all.

Run `apropos . | grep "(3)"`; you'll be surprised how many libraries come with man pages for their functions (e.g; curl).

Now I wonder if there are any IDEs that can automatically dial into these man pages and pull up documentation for functions?

burnt-resistor3• 4 months ago

There's guaranteed to be some sort of context-sensitive man plugin for vim &| nvim for shell scripts.

Also, have you ever seen the DOS Borland IDE context sensitive help UX?

skydhash• 4 months ago

I think for Vim, it’s “K”. But for emacs, you only need to use “m-x man” and have a nice viewer.

simoncion3• 4 months ago

  apropos --sections=3 .

may be a better version of what you propose, depending on what you're looking for. On my system, this also gives me entries from sections like '3x' and '3ossl' and '3bsd'.

pfdietz• 4 months ago

I'm feeling old now.

beej71• 4 months ago

My favorite piece of man trivia is from the source of the tunefs BSD man page, which contains:

    .\" Take this out and a Unix Daemon will dog your steps from now until
    .\" the time_t's wrap around.
    .Pp
    You can tune a file system, but you cannot tune a fish.

https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/main/sbin/tunefs...

gmassman• 4 months ago

I guess the joke is you can scale a file system or a fish, but can only tune a file system?

fragmede• 4 months ago

Tuna is a type of fish so the joke is that they sound the same.

pwdisswordfishy• 4 months ago

You can tune a fish, it's that the command for that is fish_config instead.

et1337• 4 months ago

Thousands of keystrokes saved by not having to type “man syscall”… and millions of hours lost by confused folks like OP (and myself)

casey2• 4 months ago

Luckily hours lost by the incompetent don't amount to much.

nicbou• 4 months ago

Needless obscurity is not a virtue

throwanem3• 4 months ago

Remarkable that no one yet here, including the article author, reports the true origin of these section numbers: they identified (depending on section size, one or a group of) physical binders in the series published by AT&T to document System V UNIX, and when you got an update to your system software, it came with a package of new manual pages which you would physically install in the binders to replace the now-superseded older versions. Everything you hate about man pages is in consequence of that origin, and of the corollary that the online version was never designed to be authoritative.

I have one of those physical binders, a volume of Section 3 for an AT&T 3B2, in the software section of my library downstairs. A beautiful artifact in every respect, of the level of quality you would imagine in the manual for a machine that cost $15,000 in the 80s.

mbo• 4 months ago

Note that this is contrary to the convention used in the Erlang community, where the number is used to disambiguate function definitions with different parameter counts, e.g. in https://www.erlang.org/docs/18/man/supervisor.html we see definitions of `start_link/2` and `start_link/3`.

It is a stylistic convention to always add this number to any reference to a function, even if there is only one definition.

Number in man page titles e.g. sleep(3)

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