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Unix recursion: The manual page for the manual
CLI Post #2748, on Feb 14, 2021 in TG

Unix recursion: The manual page for the manual

Description

The image presents a classic piece of Unix/Linux humor. At the top, a caption reads, 'If you ever feel useless, remember there is a manual page for man'. Below is a screenshot of a command-line terminal with a dark, purplish background and white monospaced text. The terminal displays the output of the command 'man man', which is the manual page for the 'man' command itself. The output shows the standard sections of a man page, including NAME, SYNOPSIS, and DESCRIPTION, explaining what the 'man' command does. The humor lies in the circular and self-referential nature of the action. The 'man' command is used to view the manual for other commands, so looking up the manual for 'man' implies a paradox: one would need to know how to use 'man' in the first place to even run the command. For experienced developers, this is a well-known 'rite of passage' discovery that highlights both the thoroughness and the occasional absurdity of classic command-line tools

Categories

CLI Documentation OperatingSystems DevCommunities TechHistory

Comments

20
Anonymous ★ Top Pick You know you're a senior dev when you use `man man` not for help, but to check if the `less` pager is configured with your custom keybindings
  1. Anonymous ★ Top Pick

    You know you're a senior dev when you use `man man` not for help, but to check if the `less` pager is configured with your custom keybindings

  2. Anonymous

    Unix ships a man page for man; meanwhile our “/healthz” microservice still just links to a Confluence doc that 404s - so much for self-documenting architecture

  3. Anonymous

    The existence of 'man man' is proof that even documentation needs documentation - it's the original inception of tech debt, where we've recursively documented our way into needing a manual for reading manuals, perfectly capturing the enterprise architect's dream of infinite abstraction layers

  4. Anonymous

    The ultimate recursion: needing to read the manual to understand how to read manuals. It's like that moment when you realize the best documentation for your documentation tool is... more documentation. At least 'man man' won't throw a stack overflow - unlike that time you tried to implement your own help system and accidentally created an infinite loop of '--help' flags calling each other

  5. Anonymous

    UNIX: man man. Enterprise: a Confluence page titled "How to find the docs" that links to itself, 404s, and is marked "current" by a compliance bot

  6. Anonymous

    man man: because even the help command needs RTFM to explain its own hell

  7. Anonymous

    Unix maturity metric: when your docs have docs; man(1) is the base case - press q to escape the recursion before product asks for a runbook for the runbook

  8. Deleted Account 5y

    so useless...

  9. @TheBestTvarynka 5y

    No, wait. man page is very important. where should i learn about the -k flag, for example?

  10. @vody_19_05 5y

    but what about woman

    1. @alhimik45 5y

      $ man woman No manual entry for woman women don't have manual

      1. @ntdsd1t 5y

        fair enough

      2. @NiKryukov 5y

        women don't exist

    2. @ccclstrknm 5y

      as useless as man manual

  11. @mvolfik 5y

    Tbf i used quite it a few times

    1. @moxxiq 5y

      to test man (p. s. me too)

    2. @elderbard 5y

      Ditto 🤣👍🏼

  12. @abel1502 5y

    The superhero we need: man man. Half-man, half-man

  13. @GLXBX 5y

    Kinda useful actually

  14. @ayemets 5y

    I actually used it couple of times, not that bad :D

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