Hi Doug, > > Man pages are not tutorials or complete manuals > > As Federico said, they absolutely should be complete.
That might have been me, I certainly think they should be. > Perhaps Gnu's most egregious contribution to Unix was to turn texinfo > with its paleolithic interface into the "complete" documentation with > man pages as stubs. Yep. > Ralph wrote: > > There was _The Unix Programming Environment_ which, coming from K&R, > > was how I learnt Unix existed. > > A quibble: that book is Kernighan and Pike, not Kernighan and Ritchie. Yes, sorry, I knew that. My meaning was I'd read K&R, as in _The C Programming Language_, learnt Unix existed due to it, and then read _The Unix Programming Environment_. I garbled. > It is indeed a good book--topped Amazon's daily best-seller list when > it first came out. An impressive feat indeed in 1984. :-) I still recommend it to folks that want to understand the underlying philosophy of Unix, now obscured by the many layers and deviations of modern desktops and systemd(1). Aside: It's a shame cm.bell-labs.com seems down so much of the time these days. I used to prod Geoff Collyer and he'd fix it but Geoff's own domain seems ill these days. I might try Russ Cox and see if he knows the current situation. Cheers, Ralph.
