So here's a thing I've been wondering about for years, really:

There's the man pages every system has. There are *a lot* of them, and
some are actually quite interesting reads. The thing I'm wondering about
is this: how do I get a birds eye view of what's there?

Of course there's `apropos <keyword>` and `man -k <keyword>`, also the
man intro pages are somewhat informative, but what I'm missing is a
plain old table of contents.

Of course I could say `ls /usr/share/man/man8`, but that feels kind of
clumsy.

Does anyone know if there's a canonical way of producing like a list of
all man pages in say section 8?

Cheers, lkh
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On 2023-04-11, <lkh@cosmic.voyage> <lkh@cosmic.voyage> wrote:

So here's a thing I've been wondering about for years, really:

There's the man pages every system has. There are *a lot* of them, and
some are actually quite interesting reads. The thing I'm wondering about
is this: how do I get a birds eye view of what's there?

I know the openbsd man pages are structured in a way that introduces
them in logical ways. The afterboot page starts things off, and it leads
you to security and a few others for dealing with system admin.

Even better, some folks have built up a sort of "reading list":

https://gist.github.com/QWxleA/0a3e28f4a3387e5087e8f3608c32fd03

For debian systems it's less awesome, sadly. Manpages are hit or miss.
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James Tomasino <tomasino@cosmic.voyage> wrote:

I know the openbsd man pages are structured in a way that introduces
them in logical ways. The afterboot page starts things off, and it leads
you to security and a few others for dealing with system admin.

Even better, some folks have built up a sort of "reading list":

https://gist.github.com/QWxleA/0a3e28f4a3387e5087e8f3608c32fd03

Nice, I didn't know about that. Seems to be a strong
argument in favour of OpenBSD.

For debian systems it's less awesome, sadly. Manpages are hit or miss.

I know, I really like the cosmic.voyage(1) man page, though. I think every shared system should have something like that.

cheers,

lkh

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On Tue, 11 Apr 2023, lkh@cosmic.voyage wrote:

There's the man pages every system has. There are *a lot* of them, and
some are actually quite interesting reads. The thing I'm wondering about
is this: how do I get a birds eye view of what's there?

Of course there's `apropos <keyword>` and `man -k <keyword>`, also the
man intro pages are somewhat informative, but what I'm missing is a
plain old table of contents.

Tangent: GNU Texinfo help system has this exact table of contents;
and the re-generation of such page is a part of installation process of
every software that provides its own Texinfo book. <https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo-html/Installing-Dir-Entries.html>

This system-wide "table of contents" is the first thing visible when one
run an `info` command without any parameter. This is the screen I'm seeing
when doing so on my system:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------- File: dir, Node: Top This is the top of the INFO tree

This (the Directory node) gives a menu of major topics.
Typing "q" exits, "?" lists all Info commands, "d" returns here,
"h" gives a primer for first-timers,
"mEmacs<Return>" visits the Emacs manual, etc.

In Emacs, you can click mouse button 2 on a menu item or cross reference
to select it.

* Menu:

Archiving
* Shar utilities: (sharutils). Shell archiver, uuencode/uudecode.
* Tar: (tar). Making tape (or disk) archives.

AVR Programming & development tools.
* AvrDude: (avrdude). AVR program downloader/uploader.

DOS
* Mtools: (mtools). Mtools: utilities to access DOS disks in Unix.

-----Info: (dir)Top, 509 lines --Top------------------------------------------- No `Prev' or `Up' for this node within this document. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Admittedly, on daily basis, I hadn't used this screen as much as I should;
but sometimes idle curiousity got better of me when I accidentally pressed
"u"p from some specific book I was reading and ended up on this screen.
I learned that AVRDUDE also got its Texinfo book from this
table of contents page actually.

Regards,
~xwindows
--
xwindows' gallery of freely-licensed artworks
https://tilde.club/~xwindows/ http://tilde.club/~xwindows/ gopher://tilde.club/1/~xwindows/
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