Reading man pages is a skill of it’'s own and the quality of man pages vary. However the ways of figuring out how to do something. ‘Command -h’ or ‘command --help’ ‘man command’ Search online for ‘command examples’.
I get confused every time I install a distro and man isn’t installed by default. I guess I get the bare minimum philosophy, but it throws me off every time. First thing I install is vim, man, git, and probably a couple other things I can’t remember right now.
I do like a decent man page that has examples for us dummies and I have found that they have improved a lot over the years.
Agreed, in any context where I’d open man I’d rather tldr instead. If you needed to read chunks of documentation like in man I’d rather just google the docs instead than clunkily try to read in terminal.
The best was on arch because I had no idea how to use pacman, which I needed to install man, when I needed how to use pacman. I will have to take a look at tldr. I mostly use Debian without a desktop environment, but have an Arch VM for gaming here and there. Works out.
If you’re electing to use linux, you got time to burn. Spend a little time getting comfy with manpages. Little things like that really add up to being effective.
“tldr pages. Simplified and community-driven man pages. The tldr pages are a community effort to simplify the beloved man pages with practical examples.”
Manpages are good reference documentation when you already know which tool to use and how to use it and just need to tweak something. They can often be overwhelming otherwise. Just look at the number of flags on any git command, for example.
You’ve nailed this here, yet get downvotes. The amount of times I’ve gone to a man page and my eyes glaze over. Really handy to learn new flags or if you forget, but as an introductory material. They don’t work for everyone. People learn in different ways, sometimes by doing and my brain isn’t wired this way.
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