Children don't learn to speak a language by learning all the grammar and conjugation rules first. They learn by repeating phrases they've heard before and they generalize. Usually we learn tools the same way. We see someone else using a tool, and we do what they're doing, and generalize.
That's not to say that man pages should consist only of examples. There are times when you really do need to understand how the tool processes corner cases and really understand how it works. But I expect most of us here can relate to the experience of opening the man page for a tool and being completely baffled by a wall of unfamiliar jargon. Most of the time you just want to see how to do the most normal common functions, especially when you're learning a tool the first time.
The LLMs are super good at doing that translation, though. They can write those formats no problem.
cheat() {
curl "cht.sh/$1"
}Hello! My big takeaway from last month’s musings about man pages was that examples in man pages are really great, so I worked on adding (or improving) examples to two of my favourite tools’ man pages.
Here they are:
The goal here was really just to give the absolute most basic examples of how to use the tool, for people who use tcpdump or dig infrequently (or have never used it before!) and don’t remember how it works.
So far saying “hey, I want to write an examples section for beginners and infrequent users of this tools” has been working really well. It’s easy to explain, I think it makes sense from everything I’ve heard from users about what they want from a man page, and maintainers seem to find it compelling.
Thanks to Denis Ovsienko, Guy Harris, Ondřej Surý, and everyone else who reviewed the docs changes, it was a good experience and left me motivated to do a little more work on man pages.
I’m interested in working on tools’ official documentation right now because:
tcpdump -w out.pcap, it’s useful to pass -v to print a live summary of how many packets have been captured so far. That’s really useful, I didn’t know it, and I don’t think I ever would have noticed it on my own.It’s kind of a weird place for me to be because honestly I always kind of assume documentation is going to be hard to read, and I usually just skip it and read a blog post or Stack Overflow comment or ask a friend instead. But right now I’m feeling optimistic, like maybe the documentation doesn’t have to be bad? Maybe it could be just as good as reading a really great blog post, but with the benefit of also being actually correct? I’ve been using the Django documentation recently, and it’s really good! We’ll see.
The tcpdump project tool’s man page is written in the roff language, which is kind of hard to use and that I really did not feel like learning it.
I handled this by writing a very basic markdown-to-roff script to convert Markdown to roff, using similar conventions to what the man page was already using. I could maybe have just used pandoc, but the output pandoc produced seemed pretty different, so I thought it might be better to write my own script instead. Who knows.
I did think it was cool to be able to just use an existing Markdown library’s ability to parse the Markdown AST and then implement my own code-emitting methods to format things in a way that seemed to make sense in this context.
I went on a whole rabbit hole learning about the history of roff, how it’s evolved since the 70s, and who’s working on it today, inspired by learning about the mandoc project that BSD systems (and some Linux systems, and I think Mac OS) use for formatting man pages. I won’t say more about that today though, maybe another time.
In general it seems like there’s a technical and cultural divide in how documentation works on BSD and on Linux that I still haven’t really understood, but I have been feeling curious about what’s going on in the BSD world.