For many, many years now when I want to browse a man page about something I’ll type man X into my terminal, substituting X for whatever it is I wish to learn about. Depending on the manual, it’s short and therefore easy to find what I want, or I am deep in the woods because I’m trying to find a specific flag that appears many times in a very long document. Woe is me if the flag switch is a bare letter, like x.
And let’s say it is x. Now I am searching with /x followed by n n n n n n n n N n n n n n. Obviously I’m not finding the information I want, the search is literal (not fuzzy, nor “whole word”), and even if I find something the manual pager might overshoot me because finding text will move the found line to the top of the terminal, and maybe the information I really want comes one or two lines above.
So… there HAS to be a better way, right? There has to be a modern, fast, easily greppable version to go through a man page. Does it exist?
P.S. I am not talking about summaries like tldr because I typically don’t need summaries but actual technical descriptions.
Kind of off topic, but you know what would be cool? If you had an ‘man explain’ command that would define all the flags/args in a command, like:
man explain rsync --append-verify --progress -avz -e "ssh -p 2222" root@$dip:/sdcard/DCIM/Camera newphonepixWould give you:
rsync - a fast, versatile, remote (and local) file-copying tool --append-verify --append w/old data in file checksum --progress show progress during transfer --archive, -a archive mode is -rlptgoD (no -A,-X,-U,-N,-H) --verbose, -v increase verbosity --compress, -z compress file data during the transfer --rsh=COMMAND, -e specify the remote shell to useetc.
Like this?
Or these?
Here’s what I get in fish when I start writing a
rsynccommand and hit tab to ask for completions:❱ rsync --append-verify --progress -avz - -0 --from0 (All *from/filter files are delimited by 0s) --delete (Delete files that don’t exist on sender) -4 --ipv4 (Prefer IPv4) --delete-after (Receiver deletes after transfer, not before) -6 --ipv6 (Prefer IPv6) --delete-before (Receiver deletes before transfer (default)) -8 --8-bit-output (Leave high-bit chars unescaped in output) --delete-delay (Find deletions during, delete after) [more lines omitted]There is a Plugin for Zsh (ohmyzsh) that gives you that right in the shell. I use it all the time and rely on it. Don’t have the name on my mind though, sorry.
Please do tell once you’ve figured it out.
Fish does this but is intentionally POSIX noncompliant so you’d wanr to keep the old shell installed if you run other people’s script.
Bonus:
You can open man pages inside GNOME Help by usingyelp man:XFor KDE users, this also works with
khelpcenter.Thank you, that’s awesome.
wow I kept opening
man:somethingwithoutsectionunfortunatelyin firefox instead of doing that lol
I always add a space or two before the flag:
/ -xI’d also like some guidance on this problem (other than “use emacs”), but searching for “ -x” will have a lower false positive rate
Still waiting for someone to create Woman
I picture these pages being inviting and helpful, with maybe ascii art “awk sweet awk” or the like, rather than the current “maintenance locker full of random tools” vibe
I am searching with /x
On most systems these days you can use regular expressions there. If
/-xisn’t good enough try/-x[ ,]or whatever.I like tldr. It doesnt give incredibly in depth explanations, but it does show the basics of using most commands.
I have to remember to use tldr, one of these days. Some manpages get so lost in the pedantry of covering everything that the 99 percentile stuff is buried.
https://tldr.inbrowser.app/ for anyone curious. There’s also a command line version you can install.
Honestly, I usually just “man command” in google.
I know it’s wrong but my browser is tiled next to my terminal and it’s easy to look up stuff.
I did this before being in emacs made it so convenient to avoid, but got bit randomly by different versions or gnu vs BSD.
As someone with 0 knowledge of Linux (and very little of programming/command lines in general), this thread reads funny AF.
We are deep in the technical weeds here. 95% of Linux usage really doesn’t require such humour unfortunately.
As an emacs user, I use
M-x man. All my standard keybindings make finding what I need very easy.Of course, it’s not so fast if you aren’t already in emacs.
+1, displaying in a Emacs buffer solves any issues I could have. If you’re already ‘in’ Emacs, this will be more frictionless than shell scripts around
man
man -k printf Search the short descriptions and manual page names for the keyword printf as regular expression. Print out any matches. Equivalent to apropos printf.info
boooooo
You can set on what line on the screen less (the pager program man uses by default) puts search results with the
-jn/--jump-target=noption. For example, using.5as a value for n makes less focus the line with the search result on the center of the screen. This should help with your overshoot issue.Either set the option within less with the
-command followed byj.5↵ for the current running instance of less, or set and export theLESSenvironment variable inside your~/.bashrcto have less always behave that way.You can search via regex. For instance you know a section heading or flag is the first thing on a line preceded with spaces. I also find it earier to read with extensions for colors.
the / and ? commands in the pagers
moreand mostlessimplementations should support regular expressions (usually BREs in my experience); which is the same thing grep uses. Consider reading your friendly neighborhood regex formatting manpage, if you are confused. As for easily scrolling,^Gto terminate your search followed byb(or your favorite vi or emacs scrolling bind) to scroll back should be sufficient.Also,
man some-manpage | grep expressionworks, if you didn’t know.
