Show HN: manpages-tldr – short manpages with examples

https://github.com/JIghtuse/manpages-tldr

by JIghtuse • 12 years ago

48 31 12 years ago

My small project similar to bropages and tldr, but (finally!) using manpages only. Manpages generated from Markdown files by Pandoc.

Jonovono2• 12 years ago

This was on here not long ago: http://bropages.org/

hav• 12 years ago

Wow. It took me ten seconds to click the link and read the description where the difference is highlighted. Can't you spare ten seconds?

croisillon• 12 years ago

I can : "This was on here not long ago: http://bropages.org/ but don't check it if you don't have ten seconds spare."

Welcome.

Jonovono2• 12 years ago

hah damn :( My bad, apologies! I skimmed over the project and saw that it seemed similar so thought i'd throw that up there for people interested in it!

pax• 12 years ago

it would've been great if all these (3 so far?) tldr man attempts would've also had a web interface, so local install would be optional

JIghtuse5• 12 years ago

Well, pandoc can easily generate html, which can be styled as you wish. I make a list of tldr-manpages on my homepage: http://begorov.me/man-tldr/

blueblob5• 12 years ago

It would be nice to have an example that is viewable from the markdown/on github. I think it would make people more likely to build it.

JIghtuse5• 12 years ago

Do you mean screenshot of opened manpage?

blueblob5• 12 years ago

Yeah, that's one way. Or a similar text formatting on html/md on the readme. If you look at the bropages one, it very concretely shows you what it is. Any way of doing this makes it easier for people to tell what exactly they're getting.

andreasvc2• 12 years ago

Why can't people just improve manpages so that they include a readable abstract and examples instead of coming up with projects with cute names?

jasonlotito• 12 years ago

So you think they should be "written as part of real manpages?"

DanBC2• 12 years ago

From the readme:

This project aims to make fast-updated, practical and precise manpages with examples for everyday usage. Its idea based on similar projects, like bropages and tldr, but written as part of real manpages (mostly converted from Markdown with pandoc).

And if OP is reading this there's a couple of typos there.

Normally I don't care, but this is a do umentation project so it's important.

Its idea based

Should be

It's an idea based

andreasvc2• 12 years ago

What I meant is to submit patches to the upstream manpages, so that everyone benefits.

JIghtuse5• 12 years ago

Thanks. English is not my native language. Of course, this can not be an excuse.

JIghtuse5• 12 years ago

It is possible, but it takes a long way to approve and distribute manpages after changes. I like Michael Kerrisk for all his work. Manpages are great and I'm not trying to replace it, they have much more useful information.

userbinator• 12 years ago

Another way to think about this is, why can't manpages be written more concisely, so that the most common options and syntax are on the first page/"above the fold"?

Here is the 7th edition UNIX manual for comparison: http://cm.bell-labs.com/7thEdMan/bswv7.html

dredmorbius6• 12 years ago

The printed output of the BSD 3.4 manuals for the first UNIX system I used (other than for playing BSD games as a kid) always had a certain fascination for me. Several large 3-ring binders comprising the sections of the manual, Postscript printed from their troff sources.

Note that you can still do this with manpages:

    man -Tps bash > /tmp/bash.ps

Or if you prefer PDF output:

    man -Tps bash | ps2pdf - > /tmp/bash.pdf

... not that this addresses the content of the manpages, as you note. But at least you can decide on the format.

hf2• 12 years ago

Yes, as in that case

* the survival of OP's labour is more likely; and

* one might use something like `eg`[0] to directly jump to the 'Examples' section.

[0] I gave a possible implementation below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7167835).

fredley• 12 years ago

This is the man I've been looking for my whole life.

hf2• 12 years ago

Elsewhere[0] I mentioned a shell alias called `eg` that jumps to the 'Examples' section in traditional man-pages.

I made great use of it with the excellently structured yet rather verbose git man-pages.

Anyways, here's the alias:

    alias eg='man --pager='\''less -p "^[A-Z]* ?EXAMPLES"'\'''

Try it out:

    eg git pull

(With older shells you might have to say `eg git-pull`).

Now as concerns the fine project submitted here, I'd suggest to try getting as much of those tldr's into actual man-pages. This will at least make the long-term survival of OP's labour more probable.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7167815

dredmorbius6• 12 years ago

Note that:

• Manpages are short. The average length is around 4 pages printed, much of which is pro-forma. Some run longer. Shells in particular (bash(1) runs around 98 pages piped through 'pr').

• Manpages include an EXAMPLES section, though this isn't always filled. That should be considered a bug.

• Manpages suffer from various projects attempting to deprecate them in favor of other forms of documentation. I particularly fault the GNU project's attempt to shoehorn info in place of man (the availability of man to Web utilities such as Debian's dwww largely wholly supplants this: info and the WWW were born within months of each other, Stallman and the FSF should have conceded the battle decades ago). Red Hat and the GNOME project have also been notably lax in providing manpages for utilities and programs. The Debian project considers omission of a manpage for an executable to be a bug, though not a release-critical one (I wish this severity would be increased).

• Fixing the deficiencies of existing manpages (and beating upstreams over the head with these until they're accepted) would be preferable to creating numerous externally maintained nonstandard variants. http://xkcd.com/927/

JIghtuse5• 12 years ago

Thank you. I would do my best to improve real manpages. As I say in comments here, tldr pages aims to provide quick access to examples and must not replace real manpages.

How do you think, would I need to change license of a project if I want to push some examples to manpages?

dredmorbius6• 12 years ago

If you're the author of the pages, you can set the licensing terms as you wish.

Generally, an MIT/BSD style license tends to be compatible with most other licenses. If you're the sole author, licensing the manpages under the same terms as the specific upstream works would work.

You might specify your own terms (say: a CC license), with a proviso "or, as an alternative, under the licensing terms of the original project for which this manual page applies".

IANAL.

blueblob5• 12 years ago

I think stating that manpages are short is a little inaccurate. The average may very well be 4 pages, but the standard deviation is probably high (bash, gcc, ssh among others have long man pages). A few commands nowadays also have multiple man pages because people don't want to search through all the crap that's in a normal manpage (ie git, gittutorial, gittutorial-2, Everyday Git, ...).

People likely aren't going to use manpages-tldr for 4 page man pages. They may use it for gcc which is 17549 lines (without an examples section and examples are littered throughout the page, meaning you have to already know what you're looking for).

According to Wikipedia, man pages have been around since 1971[1]. Man pages were designed before a paradigm shift from systems oriented to user oriented design and are usually written in a manner that makes them easy to write, not easy to read. If you think about the first time you looked at man pages, they were likely difficult to look through and you just got used to it; that's what happened to me.

I would guess that most people would like examples of basic usage. The examples section of man pages is normally near the end but it's location isn't really standardized. I normally end up searching "/^[[:blank:]]*EXAMPLE" and if I don't find it I google it.

This doesn't mean that man pages are not useful when you know what you're looking for. They can be particularly useful for c code to supplement the headers themselves.

I think forcing man pages to be something that they are not isn't much better than having a bunch of nonstandard variants. I am not saying that the examples shouldn't be added, but man pages are very technical when most people probably want a layman example before the technical details.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_page#History

dredmorbius6• 12 years ago

I think stating that manpages are short is a little inaccurate.

You're arguing against the data. Care to continue doing so?

There are a few outliers, but really, the average page length is pretty low.

I'm running this right now, and what I'm getting is (5831 pages processed):

    mean:  3.9 pages
    median:  2 pages
    standard deviation:  11.06 pages

If you'd prefer precentiles:

    5th %ile:  1
    25th %ile: 1
    75th %ile: 3
    95th %ile: 12

Max is 476 pages (zshall(1)).

This is on a Debian GNU/Linux system with 3479 packages installed. I checked only English manpages under /usr/share/man (there are another dozen or so pages for openjdk under /usr/lib/jvm, max length 29 pages).

Obviously, mileage may vary.

Code:

    cd /usr/share/man
    time for f in $(find man[0-9] -type f -name \*.[0-9].gz); do echo -e "$f\t\c"; man $f 2>&1 | pr | grep '      Page [0-9][0-9]* *$' | tail -1 | sed 's/^.*\(Page \)//'; done

Takes about 4.5 minutes to run on my system.

Compute statistical moments with your preferred analysis tool (I've got one I wrote for the purpose).

There are 68 manpages 37 pages or longer in length (2 standard deviations over mean). I see several shells (zshall, bash, tcsh), many perl utilities, and a few complex tools (mutt, openvpn, wireshark, busybox) among them. Pretty small count, actually.

Man pages were designed before a paradigm shift from systems oriented to user oriented design and are usually written in a manner that makes them easy to write, not easy to read.

While understanding a manpage's format is useful, ANY documentation which is "easy to write, not easy to read" is a bug.

As for alternatives to manual pages, I find the Linux Documentation Project's HOWTOs to be an excellent adjunct. GNU info pages, not so much.

CJefferson• 12 years ago

hf: if you see this, I think you are Hellbanned. All your posts come up as 'dead'.

Show HN: manpages-tldr – short manpages with examples

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