Many Linux man pages have the thoroughness of a fortune cookie, so I can understand the skepticism.
replyJackpot if they're just a pointer to an 'info' page.
The real jackpot is if they're the same as the --help command
replyMost people just discount man pages as unreadable and don’t even try to understand them.
replyCase in point: the jq man page is incredible and everyone I know instead runs off to google or stackoverflow or Claude to answer simple questions
I was never able to properly parse large man pages, I'm so happy that llms can now prepare half a usable command without spending an hour reading a time without a single usage example.
replyWhat I usually do when I have to read large man pages like bash(1) is I read them as PDFs:
replyman -Tpdf bash | zathura -
Replace zathura with any PDF viewer reading from stdin or just save the PDF. Hope that can be useful to someone!
But its also true that many, many man pages have extremely valuable information that no enterprising hacker should overlook, too ..
replyDo we still have those? I think it was common in late '90s, due to GNU trying to get `info` gain moment but nowadays?
replyMostly just the bash builtins have (had) this problem.
replyI blew a few minds a week ago when I told my younger coworkers about man pages. I hit ‘em with the `man man` and one dude was like “whoa!”
replyFurther blow their minds by showing them
`apropos`
https://manpages.debian.org/testing/man-db/apropos.1.en.html
replyman -k, apropos, but less to type
replyI remember my first days with Linux/Unix and being taught about man and apropos and info. But somehow I could never find anything useful via apropos!
replyWith many years of insight, I think I probably never updated the database.
Reminds me of the old canard of 'man woman'
replyman, cat, lynx... We're all just creatures in a vast universe
reply$ man -k <whatever>
replydeleted
replyI still struggle with the fact that I was (or delusional) an effective C programmer "back in the day" (before google etc) and all we had was "man" to look up std/x11 system calls.
replyNow I am dismayed with juniors who can't even be bothered to use google (or llms) to look up stuff on their first hiccup.
#include <old-man-shouting-at-clouds>
That’s not a builtin, so wouldn’t it be:
reply #include <old-man-shouting-at-clouds.h>And it's kinda old, so maybe
reply #define _POSIX_C_SOURCE 1
#include <old-man-shouting-at-clouds.h>man ssh_config is even more interesting and hidden
replyProxyCommand is fun
Honest question, why is ProxyCommand `fun`? What do I get out of ProxyCommand that i do not get out of setting the correct order for ProxyJump and doing an ssh finalhost -- domy --bidding?
replyYou can get a lot more out of ProxyCommand. For example, you can run SSH over non-IP protocols, such as serial, Bluetooth RFCOMM for embedded boards, or vsock for virtual machines without networking set up at all. The latter is built into and setup up automatically by systemd:
replyhttps://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/257/systemd...
ProxyJump is a newer functionality. There used to be only ProxyCommand. ProxyJump is a shortcut for the usual way to use ProxyCommand to connect through a bastion host but ProxyCommand is more flexible. For example with ProxyCommand you can run any command to connect to the remote host. ProxyJump only connects over ssh. I think I replaced all my ProxyCommand with ProxyJump because I don't need much else than the normal use case.
replyProxyCommand allows you to use any command to setup a connection. Not necessarily an ssh command, like ProxyJump. It can be any command, as long as it receives on stdin and produces on stdout, it can act like a TCP connection.
replyProxyJump is a special case of `ProxyCommand ssh -p <port> <user>@<host>`. Can't replace the `ssh` in there when using ProxyJump.
I use ProxyCommand to run spipe tunnels for SSH.
replyWho doesn’t want you to know? Well, obviously, the man. That’s why you type man ssh, you’re forcing the man to tell you what he knows.
replyHN as a tabloid ... After all enquiring minds want to know!
replyIt’s been a while since I’ve heard RTFM
replyhahaha made me laugh, thanks :-D
replydeleted
replyHow's that supposed to help? The ssh man page is about as close as you can get to a Platonic example of "uninformative pretend-documentation".
replyIf the ssh man page were any lazier it would just be a list of arguments with no context at all, so I get the frustation. The tricky bit is that much of the "secret menu" knowledge about ssh only lives in blog posts and random issue comments, which makes the doc gap feel intentional at times. If you want real examples or usage patterns you pretty much have to scrape Stack Overflow or crawl through dotfiles in public repos hoping someone else already fought the same fight.
reply