[plug] Man pages

[Mike Holland]

On Fri, 26 Feb 1999 navarre at omen.com.au wrote:

> I find the man pages good for the reasons of speed, will run on 
> anything and are searchable. I am however put off by the fact that 
> there are no examples of how to use the command/ function in the 
> man page. Take date for example. what sort of black magic does it 
> take to use date to write the string HH:MM:SS dd/mm/yyyy so it 

My man page says use '+FORMAT' where FORMAT is the same as for strftime,
which is explained. And it has a number of examples.

	% rpm -q  -f /usr/man/man1/date.1
	sh-utils-1.16-12

e.g.  date '+%T %d/%m/%Y'

Perhaps your problem was in not using quotes (or backslash before the
space) ??  If so, that is related to the shell, not 'date', which is
something any Unix user needs to understand.

> The morrel of the story is to consult all and every source of 
> information available including email, irc, man, help, a good book 
> and the Howto pages. Generally the answer can be found in one or 
> more of these places.

  The man pages are _the_ reference documentation
(apart from the source :) when you already know which command you
want, and broadly what it should do. Unfortunately, some authors mhave
moved this information to postscript, texinfo etc. 
 "Howtos" fill a very different role.

 And 'irc' ? Is this a valuable resource? Being old enough to remember CB
radio, I have avoided irc. What channels are good for help?

What is "help"? [ fortunately, linux doesnt give the System V response to
that command (the original author of SCCS was a complete moron, <but I
digress> ) ].

And dont forget dejanews!

Mike Holland <mike at golden.wattle.id.au>            Perth, Australia.
                          --==--
3rd Law of Computing:
        Anything that can go wr
fortune: Segmentation violation -- Core dumped