When reading a manpage for complex tools like rsync, or find, often there are options that imply several other options. Or like with wget the manpage will recommend a several options together for a certain situation. So consider this excerpt:
… Actually, to download a single page and all its requisites (even if they exist on separate websites), and make sure the lot displays properly locally, this author likes to use a few options in addition to -p:
wget -E -H -k -K -p http://<site>/<document>
At that point interested readers are essentially driven to do four separate searches on that manpage to chase down each of those options. So I hit: HOME / -E. Got lucky because the first match just happened to be the -E option and not chatter about “Content-Encoding”.
Then what? I forgot all options I need to search for and lost my starting place, so I had to browse/search back to where I was to learn that I next need to search for -H. Then I hit: HOME / -H. It brings me to an irrelevant match on “non-HSTS-compliant”. So I must hit / ENTER many times until I reach the right position. Searching for -k is tedious too. …And so on…
With rsync the -a: “archive mode is -rlptgoD (no -A,-X,-U,-N,-H)”. Rsync is not a disaster though as they took care to summarize all options with a one-liner in one place.
Anyway, unless I am missing a trick¹, it seems there must be a lot of time waste with users having to jump around using a dicey search mechanism prone to false positives.
¹ In the course of writing this rant, I discovered I could search the rsync man page by doing /-a\>, which at least skips past many false hits by specifying a word boundary. Still more tedious than it has to be though.
Have you tried
tldr? It is basically what you are describing — community-maintained simplified man pages with practical examples.Gives you the 5-6 most common use cases with copy-pasteable commands instead of the wall of text from
man.Install with
pip install tldrorsudo apt install tldron most distros. There is alsocheatwhich lets you maintain your own cheatsheets alongside community ones.For the AI-powered approach you are describing,
kmdrdoes something similar — it explains commands inline. But honestlytldrcovers 90% of use cases and works offline.The tldr app is in Debian official repos so I installed it with apt tools. From there, it failed me:
$ tldr wg Downloading tldr pages to ~/.local/share/tldr tldr: HttpExceptionRequest Request { host = "tldr.sh" port = 443 secure = True requestHeaders = [] path = "/assets/tldr.zip" queryString = "" method = "GET" proxy = Nothing rawBody = False redirectCount = 10 responseTimeout = ResponseTimeoutDefault requestVersion = HTTP/1.1 proxySecureMode = ProxySecureWithConnect } (ConnectionFailure Network.Socket.getAddrInfo (called with preferred socket type/protocol: AddrInfo {addrFlags = [], addrFamily = AF_UNSPEC, addrSocketType = Stream, addrProtocol = 0, addrAddress = 0.0.0.0:0, addrCanonName = Nothing}, host name: Just "tldr.sh", service name: Just "443"): does not exist (Temporary failure in name resolution))Looks like it needs cloud access. My gear only works on Tor, so then I tried it this way:
$ torsocks tldr wg No tldr entry for wg $ torsocks tldr wget No tldr entry for wget $ torsocks tldr find No tldr entry for find $ torsocks tldr rsync No tldr entry for rsync $ torsocks tldr -u Downloading tldr pages to ~/.local/share/tldr tldr: Data.Binary.Get.runGet at position 4: Did not find end of central directory signature CallStack (from HasCallStack): error, called at libraries/binary/src/Data/Binary/Get.hs:351:5 in binary-0.8.8.0:Data.Binary.GetAlso checked for
kmdrbut that’s not in the official debian repos, which I try to stick to. I appreciate the tips though.