Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2004 11:28:08 -0400 From: Tom Rhodes <trhodes@FreeBSD.org> To: Bill Moran <wmoran@potentialtech.com> Cc: Anthony Duerr <duerra@pushitlive.net> Subject: Re: Man Pages Thoughts Message-ID: <20040819112808.52f7bdc5@localhost.pittgoth.com> In-Reply-To: <20040819085015.73799dca.wmoran@potentialtech.com> References: <41249BC4.7000205@pushitlive.net> <20040819085015.73799dca.wmoran@potentialtech.com>
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On Thu, 19 Aug 2004 08:50:15 -0400 Bill Moran <wmoran@potentialtech.com> wrote: > Anthony Duerr <duerra@pushitlive.net> wrote: > > > Greetings, > > My thoughts are concerning the man pages. I don't know if this is the > > perfect group to mail this to, but it seems to be as close as I could get. > > > > Anyway, a thought occured to me this morning when reading through some > > documentation. It would be great to see an "Examples" section in the > > man pages. Often times the prototypes are difficult to read or > > understand because of their length, option depth, etc. An "Examples" > > area in the man pages would allow the man creator to put in a couple of > > the more commonly used prototypes examples in to get a user started on > > the right track. > > > > Granted, this would mostly be beneficial to newer users like me, but it > > would save quite a bit of frustration when trying to process the vast > > array of different commands in my mind. > > > > I'm interested in your thoughts! > > As already stated, many man pages do contain an examples section. This > section is optional. > > If you could point out which man pages are lacking examples, it's likely > that you could get some folks motivated to add an examples section to > them. %pwd /usr/src %find . -name '*.[1-9]' | xargs grep 'EXAMPLES' | wc -l 493 %find . -name '*.[1-9]' | wc -l 2892 So basically, you only need to fix 2399 manual pages; NOTES: 1: This counts files in contrib; 2: Some example sections would be dubious (rc.conf, make.conf, etc); 3: Personally, I honestly don't have the time for a project like this. Sorry. -- Tom Rhodes
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