Wednesday, May 02, 2007

The MAN

"Hey Man, you are _THE_ Man!". Well these are my words of appreciation for the great hacker who thought the concept of man pages. As far as I know any help available on this planet can not be more standardized or comprehensive than the man pages of unix. The format of man pages is fixed all through out the generations of all sorts of unixes(linux included). Man pages are most readily available and I find them much much more convenient than googling around. Man pages are precise. clear-cut, comprehensive and very very well written and the great thing is they even report the bug or any other such flaw, if it exists. In the vast world of unixes, where each command itself is a utility, the number of commands has increased to a surprisingly large number and remembering all of them is difficult and not very productive, also they have switches and options for each command. So, I can think of only resort to this problem is to just remember one command, that is "man" and here you are, the undefeated warrior of unix world.
Man pages are well divided with respect to kind of users using them. They cater to all kind of users may it be a normal user, an admin or an application developer or even a kernel hacker. Everyone in unix is so-much in love with man pages, that one cannot imagine his or her day without doing "man X something".
Some people think unixes are cocky and elitist kind of OS's, well yes, they are just great and everyone loves it that way. Similar concept is applied to man pages, man pages seems very cryptic to many people, but they are very standardized and always follow a fixed pattern and hence are consistent throughout.
So people, whenever in doubt in unix just be a "man".

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice one !! I though you'd get into the "MAN rules WOMAN suck" kinda puns as well :-D

!Teq-uila Del Zapata said...

no way dear. I don't want to get attention of Female Activists ;)