[Info-vax] Radical command line suggestion

[mcleanjoh at gmail.com]

On Thursday, March 19, 2015 at 6:55:52 AM UTC+11, John Reagan wrote:
> On Wednesday, March 18, 2015 at 11:56:47 AM UTC-4, Bob Koehler wrote:
> > In article <f26e8302-e3f9-4fd9-bb73-9501fe886115 at googlegroups.com>, johnwall+++ at yahoo.co.uk writes:
> > > 
> > > man and info may have advantages (vs HELP) as tools for navigation. Maybe
> > > HELP needs an update then?
> > 
> >    man has advantages?  On what planet?  man is the worst thing I've
> >    ever used, and is only barely tolerable if the X10 based xman gui
> >    is used instead of the terminal window man.
> > 
> >    How many times did I have to re-rad vast sections of the ksh man
> >    page when a lower paragraph pointed to an earlier entity.
> > 
> >    ARGHHHHHHHH.
> 
> Uh, the man on my systems has an emacs-like command set that lets me page forward, page backwards, search for things, etc.

... and man often contains examples, makes recommendations against using deprecated unsafe code and has cross-referencing.

Because Linux has been created from software developer input 'man' often has entries for routines that tie together a bunch of low level routines, eg. one routine to create a pair of pipes (aka mailboxes) for interprocess comms.  On this basis new things get added to 'man' as new routines are supplied in Linux.

As Simon (I think it was) said here a few months ago, Help is more often just 'help with syntax'.  If you are not sure what qualifier to use you might need to guess and then look at two or three Help 'pages' rather than see a one or two line summary of what each qualifier is about.