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man needs to evolve. I should be able to type something like “man --custom -- wget -E -H -k -K -p” and get docs on just select options (linkage.ds8.zone)
submitted 10 months ago by LibreMonk@linkage.ds8.zone to c/linux@discuss.tchncs.de
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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.

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[-] LibreMonk@linkage.ds8.zone 1 points 3 months ago

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.Get

Also checked for kmdr but that’s not in the official debian repos, which I try to stick to. I appreciate the tips though.

this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2025
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