Talk:man page

Template man page

Are there templates to link directly to the man page of a program, like say http://man.cx/ip%288%29 or http://linux.die.net/man/8/ip for — Preceding unsigned comment added by Semsi Paco Virchow (talk • contribs) 08:29, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, although there's probably a better place to ask for editing help than a talk page. Guy Harris (talk) 10:05, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Thank you! Semsi Paco Virchow (talk) 14:41, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Do we really need citations?

Man is a self-explanatory thing here, and you can actually use man to figure out how to use man. I don't really think citations are needed unless you cite your console.

Folddoc

The original external link to the Folddoc man pages (that don't seem to be available)

• Internet gateway to Linux's man command

Analogous commands

The man command is analogous to the help command in the command shells of DOS, OS/2 and Microsoft Windows.

I don't think this is correct. The help command in DOS/Windows (and I expect OS/2, although I'm not personally familiar w/ it) only provides help for built-in commands - analogous to the help command in most *nix shells. Documentation for 3rd-party commands is never available via the help command in DOS/Windows. The man command & man pages are more like a PDF viewer & PDF User Manuals included by some 3rd-party programs installed on DOS/Windows. To me, 'analogous' indicates stronger/more similarities between man and help than actually exist. Beolach (talk) 05:53, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. man has nothing significant in common with the DOS-style help command. I am being bold and removing the misleading claim. 87.194.117.80 (talk) 01:11, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

Titles

Someone needs to link manual page to Unix manual, since manual page is what I call them in conversation, I can't be the only one that expands "man". 65.95.124.5 06:36, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

Done. Golwengaud 20:47, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

I still don't see why the man pages are actually called "on-line manuals". Where those manuals only available online back in 1971?? Now they are delivered with every UNIX distribution, so why do they continue to call them "on-line" manual pages? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.126.42.203 (talk) 11:57, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

On-line as opposed to dead-tree, I believe. EdC (talk) 01:38, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Yes, EdC is correct here. Guy Harris (talk) 12:12, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

manual page sections

Shouldn't they be called categories? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.169.238.182 (talk) 06:14, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

They aren't. man 8 gets (Alternatively, what manual page do you want from section 8?) BioTube (talk) 21:40, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Repositories and Alpha order

Maybe it's me, maybe I'm the only pedantic guy here, but I seem to be a lone editor when I attempt to place these in alpha order of title. Someone, anonymous IP based, keeps promoting their favourite much higher in the list and I keep putting it back. Since this is a single person moving things around I'm guessing we have a silent consensus, but it would be good to have another pedant police this, too. Fiddle Faddle (talk) 09:02, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

Navigation

The information in Navigation isn't really anything to do with man pages per se; it's a feature of the pager used to display man pages.

Presumably, those instructions are for less; this should be noted. Those with alternative pagers (for example, more, which is probably the default on non-GNU-influenced Unix systems) will not be able to use the navigation commands mentioned. -- pne (talk) 10:44, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

mantopdf

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# usage example: ./mantopdf man
# should :-) create man.pdf in /tmp
man -t ${1} > /tmp/${1}.ps
gs -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=/tmp/${1}.pdf /tmp/${1}.ps
rm /tmp/${1}.ps

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.116.75.194 (talk) 18:42, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

Manpages suck: Lack of example usage

Compared to the help system in DEC VMS, the unix manpages are difficult to use and understand, mainly due to a lack of example command/function usage in the various subject matter. Examples tend to be quicker and easier to digest than pages of long verbose text on parameters and syntax.

But, it's hard to state in the article that manpages tend to lack examples, other than to cite extensively verbose manpages which lack any examples, I guess. :-) DMahalko (talk) 13:28, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

Article for man system per se

Perhaps there should exist a page on the man system, rather than the man page (the content of which would be encompassed by the former)? i.e., analogous to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Info_(Unix). Rnabioullin (talk) 23:00, 19 March 2012 (UTC)

History of Linux man

To make the caption of the opening screenshot a bit more precise, I did a little research, and found the following:

• It appears to be the same version of man as on my NAS, which runs Ubuntu.
• It's the same version on another machine I have access to which runs Fedora.
• According to man man, this version is maintained today by the Debian project, but was first written in 1990. This means it predates Linux, the first version of which appeared in November 1991.
• It is evidently not the first version of the man utility, as this Wikipedia article mentions earlier ones.
• Unlike most of the historically standard Linux userland, it is not part of the GNU project. GNU prefers Info pages instead.
• I couldn't find out what system Linux man was originally written for. We could ask its original author, John W. Eaton (now best known for GNU Octave), but I don't think such communication would be considered a reliable source.

Hairy Dude (talk) 13:21, 11 February 2018 (UTC)

The FAQ in the Debian package says:

The man (currently http://primates.ximian.com/~flucifredi/man/) and man-db packages forked from a common code base in the mid-1990s. The original goal of man-db was, as indicated by the name, to add database caching to manual page searches. The increase in computer performance has considerably outpaced the growth of manual page collections, so some people now ask what the point is of using man-db rather than man.

The README for this man command says

man was written by John Eaton (jwe@bevo.che.wisc.edu). He does not maintain man anymore - please do not bother him with remarks about the current version, which is rather different from the original one.

That one appears to be the "man" package referred to from the Debian package FAQ, given the mention of Federico Lucifredi and of the primates.ximian.com URL. The README also says

There is a very different man program, also derived from John Eaton's original version (by Graeme W. Wilford) distributed under the name man_db, with version numbers like man_db-2.3.10. Do not confuse the two, they are mutually incompatible, although they perform nearly the same job.

I'm guessing that "flucifredi" is

man-db has a Savannah page at http://man-db.nongnu.org, which says it

is used by several popular GNU/Linux distributions, including:

• Arch Linux
• Debian
• Dragora GNU/Linux
• Fedora (as of 14)
• Gentoo
• openSUSE
• Ubuntu

and that "It also compiles and runs on a number of proprietary Unix systems."

So the history appears to be that John Eaton was the author of the "common code base" forked in the mid-1990's, with one branch of the fork being "man" (which is used by, among other OSes, macOS) and the other branch being "man-db".

My guess is that Eaton's "man" was originally written for "UN*X", i.e. not for any particular system.

As for the BSDs:

• FreeBSD currently has https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/man/ a man command written in Bourne shell].
• NetBSD has one that's "Copyright (c) 1987, 1993, 1994, 1995 The Regents of the University of California.", so I guess the Berkeley folks wrote their own (or modified the AT&T one to the point that there wasn't any AT&T code left).
• DragonFly BSD uses one that's also based on the Berkeley code.
• OpenBSD uses mandoc.

For whatever reason, Apple uses a descendant of John Eaton's (original GPLed?) man, rather than with the Berkeley version. Guy Harris (talk) 20:28, 11 February 2018 (UTC)

Guy Harris (talk) 20:28, 11 February 2018 (UTC)

"Die.net" listed at Redirects for discussion

A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Die.net. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 August 27#Die.net until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 23:11, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

clarify man page name

I had added - commonly refereed to only as man page - never as man(ual) page. - Because someone unfamiliar with man pages used Wikipedia as a reference that it was a manual page. Yes, and is virtually always just called man page, as the title of each page. Went so far as using a link to a man page using man(ual) because they "didn't like" the shortened name.

So I just wanted to clarify their official source for all information. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Djk44883 (talk • contribs) 20:03, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

"Man Sudo" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Man Sudo has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2023 December 1 § Man Sudo until a consensus is reached. Widefox; talk 21:26, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

Sentence case and article title capitalisation

As per Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Capital letters#Initial letters in sentences and list items, sentence case is used identically between the article title and at the start of sentences ("Wikipedia uses sentence case for sentences, article titles... Any instructions in MoS about the start of a sentence apply to items using sentence case."). There are however two lines in the article body that start "Man pages are often referred to as..." and "Man pages are usually written in English..." that seem to be better off beginning with lowercase man instead, with the assumption that the article title man page is already in sentence case. Would I be correct in assuming they should be lowercase in the article body, or are there other considerations I am missing? 9³ (talk) 04:11, 6 July 2024 (UTC)