RTFM is Sage
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this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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The idea that manuals in linux are a good way to learn and understand new software is peak linux neckbeard bs, and I will die on this hill. I congratulate OP on the exact type of autism that lets them feel this is an effective and useful method for learning new software, but if there is desire to have a greater adoption of linux maybe its bad to be snarky at folks for not instantly understand the terminal based documentation conventions of some dudes in the 70s. Maybe an alphabetical* list of all possible options is okay for referencing or searching, but is objectively insane way to learn or understand a problem.
You might be thinking of
infopages. Themanpages are just the instructions, feature flags, etc. generally, whileinfo(when available) usually has a more general / layman description of the command with examples.It's possible. A lot of things merge the info and man pages now if both are installed, that could be the case here. Or Mac just documents it further.
It's a good thing there are other resources, then. You can read tldr-pages. You can look at various official and unofficial wikis. You can look at Stackoverflow. You can look at Youtube tutorials. You can ask other people. Hell, you can ask a chatbot.
If the average user is unwilling to do that, maybe it's better that Linux does not see a wider adoption.
is the fact that people can with effort and error figure out how to do something a reason not to make it easier for them to do?
I mean
you can in theory write multi-threaded bug-free C code -- just read the docs and the specs and the source of your libs and never ever do something that seems to work but is subtly fatally incorrect
and yet we still have golang and rust and many other options to do things more safely and easily
if someone wants to use Linux but doesn't want to memorize the Hundred Mandatory Commands and Thousand Flags lest they accidentally
cat > /dev/sda, why shouldn't there be a system for them?The community abhors change. Especially changes that break conventions, even informal ones. Look at the temper tantrums people are throwing because Wayland does things differently from X.org. Changing output redirection in Bash, or how
ddworks, or any number of long-standing conventions because new users are unwilling to adapt to a new system and might end updding over the root partition would break established workflows, and worse, existing scripts and services.But the solution already exists, it's called wrapper programs. You don't have to manually update AUR packages because
yayandparualready do that. You don't have to figure out howfdiskandmkfswork because Gparted and Partition Manager do it for you.Nevertheless, using a system should always and forever be the user's responsibility. Otherwise Linux would turn into a locked-down play pen like Apple products.
Agreed! You can look elsewhere, and that's how I, and I think many other folks, learned. The OP was talking about the manuals though, specifically mentioning
/usr/bin. So to restate my point is not to say it's impossible to learn linux, but that man pages are weird and bad place to push folks looking to learn.as a professional sociotechnical problem solver I will join you on this fatal hill
like take the 4 types of documentation in diátaxis
manpages usually fulfill the reference need, and sometimes kind of that of how-to guides if you're lucky and your localmanhas examplesbut that leaves more than 50% of documentation needs lacking
and discoverability is atrocious -- you have to already know that the command (or commands) you need exists and what it's called
one of the most useful things I learned in a linux sysadmin course was
apropos/man -k, which lets you search installedmanpages by keyword. but hardly anyone else seems to know about it -- I only learned of it because a teaching assistant mentioned it off hand! -- and even then it only helps if you guess the right keyword for your problemI am vexed by this situation
People don't know about man -k because of all the man pages they should have read, they forgot the man one.
I think it should be the default if you don't use parameters. A little usage help and the list of commands (with a "do you want to see the list of commands? (Y/n)" message)
There's other ways to get info. And man pages are a great way to learn how something is expected to work on your system. And it's offline, without ads, scams, ai generated false info.
THIS. I feel like linux
manpages are as useful as an Analytical mechanics textbook for someone who just wants to drive. Like yes, sure, it's amazing we have such a detailed documentation but for God's sake just introduce basic usages firstinitially when I was learning linux. I had troubles finding the command I needed. I could have first gone and read everything and then come back to try, which I did. But sometimes the man pages, the ubuntu and arch forums weren't as great of a help as messing up myself.
Could there be a better way to document with slightly more examples: yes. Would it help: tons
But this is just my opinion, and I am just a noob
That's how I would interpret that part of the man page had I no familiarity with ssh. It doesn't seem reasonable to expect the reader to know what those brackets mean.
You get to learn the notation conventions with <> and [] fairly early on. Maybe a very new user would make that mistake. If he doesn't get it fairly quick, maybe computers aren't for him.
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.
This mentality suuucckkss
hard agree
BS. I've been using linux for over 20 years and I still don't know what those mean. I can only guess from context. It's a stupid convention to just use symbols like that and never explain it.
Read the man manpage and all will be revealed.
Following the openbsd example from the original comment I replied to, it has absolutely nothing to say about what brackets mean, so this advice would not be helpful for an openbsd system: https://man.openbsd.org/man
On my personal linux system (arch derivative, by the way), it at least mentions brackets meaning optional, but only in the context of arguments:
I think this would trip up some new users. The destination, with or without the username to connect as, may not seem like an "argument" to a new user since it doesn't have a dash before it like the example does
Sorry, I wasn't aware of that. BSD usually has excellent ~~pan~~ man pages.
Here's the relevant section in the Linux one:
Then the new user should real the ssh manpage which very clearly specifies that it is.
Agreed, and I think a larger part of it is that most folks pick it up based on context after long enough, so it's rarely explained. The square brackets are optional arguments. So I could use
ssh 192.168.1.1orssh postimo@192.168.1.1with the first asking for the account after I connect, and the second just asking for the password. You can see how the computer took it in the response you got.hostname ]192.168.1.1being it saw the@and assumed everything after was the hostname and included the ]It's worth noting that you can't just connect to a random machine like this, they need to also be running an ssh server. But I wouldn't expect you to know that without reading a great deal more of the documentation 🫠
I've been using ssh for decades, you don't have to explain it to me. It was a purely contrived example to simulate what I think a new user might experience if faced with that particular man page as their only documentation.
Oh my mistake, I didn't mean to demean at all. Yeah I think even in your example there are baked in knowledge we've picked up that we don't realize, and that a very likely response from fully fresh eyes would seeing the synopsis is "oh this isn't for me."
No worries, didn't feel demeaned but wanted to be clear that it was an attempt to try to ignore ~23 years of ssh muscle memory to try to guess what might trip up a new Linux user
Very much true in my case - I couldn't explain what the, like.. "idiomatic" meaning of those brackets is, I only guess from context and experience, and it remains a minor peeve of mine that such symbology is widely used but rarely explained