On Sat, Sep 10, 2005 at 05:56:32PM -0400, C Shore wrote: > > Seriously, the standard man page format wasn't designed for mass usage, > it was for the sysadmin who needed a reference to remind them of some > obscure (or not) feature they had forgotten, not to teach the usage of > the command.
Actually, man pages *were* intended to introduce newbies to the system. Way back in the seventies, when Unix was first released on the world, man pages *were* all the documentation available, except for a kind of cover letter that said to use the man command to find the documentation. IIRC, it advised me to use a command something like "man intro" for my first introduction, shich consisted mostly of hints what man pages to use. (it probably was a different word from "intro" -- it was a long time ago and I really forget the details. Of course, back then, the target audience was people with computer science degrees or the equivalent, and yes, you are right, that wasn't a mass audience in the 1970's. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
