For many, many years now when I want to browse a man page about something I’ll type man X into my terminal, substituting X for whatever it is I wish to learn about. Depending on the manual, it’s short and therefore easy to find what I want, or I am deep in the woods because I’m trying to find a specific flag that appears many times in a very long document. Woe is me if the flag switch is a bare letter, like x.
And let’s say it is x. Now I am searching with /x followed by n n n n n n n n N n n n n n. Obviously I’m not finding the information I want, the search is literal (not fuzzy, nor “whole word”), and even if I find something the manual pager might overshoot me because finding text will move the found line to the top of the terminal, and maybe the information I really want comes one or two lines above.
So… there HAS to be a better way, right? There has to be a modern, fast, easily greppable version to go through a man page. Does it exist?
P.S. I am not talking about summaries like tldr because I typically don’t need summaries but actual technical descriptions.
Kind of off topic, but you know what would be cool? If you had an ‘man explain’ command that would define all the flags/args in a command, like:
man explain rsync --append-verify --progress -avz -e "ssh -p 2222" root@$dip:/sdcard/DCIM/Camera newphonepix
Would give you:
rsync - a fast, versatile, remote (and local) file-copying tool
--append-verify --append w/old data in file checksum
--progress show progress during transfer
--archive, -a archive mode is -rlptgoD (no -A,-X,-U,-N,-H)
--verbose, -v increase verbosity
--compress, -z compress file data during the transfer
--rsh=COMMAND, -e specify the remote shell to use
etc.
There is a Plugin for Zsh (ohmyzsh) that gives you that right in the shell. I use it all the time and rely on it. Don’t have the name on my mind though, sorry.
Here’s what I get in fish when I start writing a rsync command and hit tab to ask for completions:
❱ rsync --append-verify --progress -avz -
-0 --from0 (All *from/filter files are delimited by 0s) --delete (Delete files that don’t exist on sender)
-4 --ipv4 (Prefer IPv4) --delete-after (Receiver deletes after transfer, not before)
-6 --ipv6 (Prefer IPv6) --delete-before (Receiver deletes before transfer (default))
-8 --8-bit-output (Leave high-bit chars unescaped in output) --delete-delay (Find deletions during, delete after)
[more lines omitted]
You can just grep the help output
$ rsync --help 2>&1 | grep -E '^ *(--append-verify|--progress|--archive)'
--archive, -a archive mode is -rlptgoD (no -A,-X,-U,-N,-H)
--append-verify --append w/old data in file checksum
--progress show progress during transfer
So it should be possible to create a simple script to do that. Similarly one can output the man document as text to stdout, which in turn can be grepped. I have no grep command at hand to do this in a useful way:
man grep | col -b
