Discussion

TIL: Number in man page titles (e.g. sleep(3))

LtWorf: Step 1: Read `man man`Step 2: Feel the urge to write an article about that

mjlee: If you like man trivia (and why else would you be reading this?) you could check out the top comment at https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man...(discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27994194)

porise: Reading this makes me wonder if Easter eggs are ever appropriate for something as ubiquitous as man.

Stratoscope: Is there a man man man article that will explain how to read man man?

amelius: Confession. I think I haven't read manpages since stackoverflow and certainly not since LLMs.Perhaps the modern version of "man" should be a program you can talk to.

nicman23: i have made llms read manpages, it is great lol

xigoi: Please no. I want to read the manual without having to talk to anything.

PhilipRoman: Interestingly, the section doesn't actually have to start with a number. TCL man pages use the 'n' section and 'man' resolves them just fine despite the ambiguity. Conversely, manpage names can also start with numbers, although this is rare (I found only one such example: man 30-systemd-environment-d-generator)

gerikson: > (... less common section numbers)One very important section number is 5 - it's for file formats. So if you forget the crontab format, you need to invoke `man 5 crontab` to read about it.

linsomniac: ... because if you do `man crontab` you get section 1, which does not document the crontab fields.

chasil: The POSIX standard manual pages for the utilities can be found here:https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/idx/xcu.htm...These would all be in section 1, if I am correct.

IshKebab: That is incredibly stupid. A documentation system designed by someone who doesn't understand how people use documentation.If man was designed by someone with any taste at all it would at least give you a menu to select (1) crontab command, (5) crontab file format. Maybe we need a rewrite in Rust to fix that.

bombcar: Easter eggs are always appropriate but it is imperative (and important) to understand how they could affect anything and everything.Which means you need to usually make it explicit to call them (man --abba or something) than something that "surprises" the user.

Normal_gaussian: It's called Claude. Or Gemini-cli. Or any other agent capable of running man."Hey <agent>, use `man` to help answer these questions about grep"

voidUpdate: In fact, the only reference to crontab(5) is in the SEE ALSO section (on my version anyway), but that doesn't say why you might want to see crontab(5), just that it exists. That is spectacularly useless

qiine: "The developer of the man-db, Colin Watson, decided that there was enough fun and the story won't get forgotten"Haha! Adequate amount of fun was provided, please resume regular man activities.

rascul: It does that, depending on implementation.