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From: "Carlos E. R." <robin_listas@es.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.unix.shell
Subject: Re: Internal navigation in the online manual
Date: Mon, 2 Nov 2026 23:27:13 +0100
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Xref: csiph.com comp.os.linux.misc:94957 comp.unix.shell:27137

On 2026-11-01 20:40, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> On 2026-10-31, Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> 
>> On 2026-10-31, Carlos E. R. wrote:
>>
>>> On 2026-10-30 20:24, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 2026-10-30, c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>      More VOLUME of docs these days ... but "As Good" ???
>>>>
>>>> Hardly.  Most manuals back in the day had a section titled
>>>> "Theory of Operation".  I really miss that.
>>>
>>> Talking of manuals, I find large man pages very difficult to use,
>>> specially when you need something specific. No clickable table of
>>> content, no clickable index. Info pages are somewhat better.
>>
>> Isn't that more about the viewer using to read the manual pages, than a
>> flaw of the online manual in itself?
> 
> At least the man command can search a man page for a text string.
> It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing.
> 

If you know the string to search for, and it doesn't happen a hundred times.

For instance, in openSUSE the search is not case sensitive, so looking 
for -l can find -L first. And of course, finds anywhere where -l or -L 
is mentioned in the text, dozen of times.

For example, the "man zypper" page (specific to *suse systems) has many 
sections, but there is not a table of contents at the start listing the 
section so that we know what section to search for.

-- 
Cheers,
        Carlos E.R.
        ES🇪🇸, EU🇪🇺.