this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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The few times I've needed to
man [app name]
on a system without internet access or on an obscure utility, I've always been able to find what I need in the included docsI hope the dev eventually gets sponsored, this is one of those utilities that you don't think you need until
--help
doesn't cut ithonestly I use the man command whenever I can. It gives distro-specific info, that documents the right version and any distro-specific patches
Back in the day with dial-up internet man pages, readmes and other included documentation was pretty much the only way to learn anything as www was in it's very early stages. And still 'man ' is way faster than trying to search the same information over the web. Today at the work I needed man page for setfacl (since I still don't remember every command parameters) and I found out that WSL2 Debian on my office workstation does not have command 'man' out of the box and I was more than midly annoyed that I had to search for that.
Of course today it was just a alt+tab to browser, a new tab and a few seconds for results, which most likely consumed enough bandwidth that on dialup it would've taken several hours to download, but it was annoying enough that I'll spend some time at monday to fix this on my laptop.