Date: Wed, 17 Jun 1998 20:14:30 -0600 (MDT) From: allen campbell <allenc@verinet.com> To: nik@nothing-going-on.demon.co.uk, sue@welearn.com.au Cc: freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Pine and Pico Message-ID: <199806180214.UAA03764@struct.> In-Reply-To: <19980617180012.64598@welearn.com.au>
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> > would show you the information you're looking for in the "Invocation" > > section. > > Of course, the "Invocation" section! Jeez, I'd never have thought of that > word, glad you mentioned it :-) > > > Alternatively, you could look at some existing shell scripts on your > > system to see if they do it. /etc/rc, /etc/rc.serial and /etc/rc.firewall > > have examples of examining the positional parameters passed to a script > > (although, granted, they're not the easiest code to understand). > > "positional parameters"? I reckon it'd be much easier to get info out of > man pages if some of these words were more familiar, and I guess that > sort of grows on you after doing battle with man pages for a while. > There isn't a glossary anywhere, is there? I've been frustrated with this also. I can honestly say that I do my best to read the available material before asking questions, but that much of that time is wasted guessing my way through enormous man pages. I have seen manual pages that provide a section list near the top. Many of the larger manual pages in HP-UX provide this. Each section in the page is listed (sans SEE ALSO, AUTHOR and other 'standard' sections,) allowing you search for a section quickly. In this case having 'Invocation' listed as one of the available sections might have done the trick. Consider the 5016 lines (according to more(1)) of the bash man page. This thing might be a lot more helpful if there was a section list something like: Sections: ARGUMENTS INVOCATION DEFINITIONS RESERVED WORDS SHELL GRAMMAR COMMENTS QUOTING PARAMETERS EXPANSION REDIRECTION ALIASES FUNCTIONS COMMAND EXECUTION ENVIRONMENT EXIT STATUS SIGNALS JOB CONTROL PROMPTING READLINE HISTORY HISTORY EXPANSION ARITHMETIC EVALUATION SHELL BUILTIN COMMANDS RESTRICTED SHELL Anyhow, If you run X, you might look into tkman. It is available in the ports and it makes manual pages a couple orders of magnitude more useful. There is a 'random manual page' button in this program in case your _really_ bored. :) -- Allen Campbell allenc@verinet.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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