this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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Nah m8, I'm generally on board with asking people to read the manual, but these unexplained conventions are nonsense. Pages really should be explicit about notation being added to commands that aren't actually a part of them
They're explained right at the beginning of the manpage.
The man manpage. I'm sure it was the first one you read? Because you wanted to know how man worked?
Sure, but that is very far from obvious, and very few people who don't already have an understanding of this stuff are going to know to look there. When I search for how to do something on the internet I mostly find 2 kinds of sources: stuff that's way dumbed down (and usually out of date/incorrect) and stuff full of unexplained notation/abbreviations/arbitrary conventions without any links to resources that explain them.
I guess my issue with the man pages is mostly that they just don't try to be approachable to the not-so-tech-litterate folk who might be interested in Linux if we had resources that didn't assume all this foreknowledge.
That's a fair point. Their problem is that they both have to be relatively concise and as exhaustive as possible, which makes it difficult to be user friendly. So the style is usually terse and more friendly to seasoned users than to the new ones.
I think beginning users would do well to invest in something like an introductory ORiley book rather than rely on the often highly dubious online stuff. I've seen so many absolutely atrocious "Linux for beginners" pages that I really wouldn't recommend any.