On-line Documentation 45indexes every single word in the entire multivolume set; man pages, on the
other hand, are still indexed solely by the program’s name and one-line
description. Today even DOS now has an indexed, hypertext system for
on-line documentation. Man pages, meanwhile, are still formatted for the
80-column, 66-line page of a DEC printing terminal.
To be fair, some vendors have been embarassed into writing their own
hypertext documentation systems. On those systems, man has become an
evolutionary deadend, often times with man pages that are out-of-date, or
simply missing altogether.
“I Know It’s Here ... Somewhere.”
For people trying to use man today, one of the biggest problems is telling
the program where your man pages actually reside on your system. Back in
the early days, finding documentation was easy: it was all in /usr/man.
Then the man pages were split into directories by chapter: /usr/man/man1,
/usr/man/man2, /usr/man/man3, and so on. Many sites even threw in /
usr/man/manl for the “local” man pages.
Things got a little confused when AT&T slapped together System V. The
directory /usr/man/man1 became /usr/man/c_man, as if a single letter
somehow was easier to remember than a single digit. On some systems, /
usr/man/manl was moved to /usr/local/man. Companies that were selling
their own Unix applications started putting in their own “man” directories.
Eventually, Berkeley modified man so that the program would search for
its man pages in a set of directories specified by an environment variable
called MANPATH. It was a great idea with just one small problem: it
didn’t work.
Date: Wed, 9 Dec 92 13:17:01 -0500
From: Rainbow Without Eyes <[email protected]>
To: UNIX-HATERS
Subject: Man page, man page, who's got the man page?For those of you willing to admit some familiarity with Unix, you
know that there are some on-line manual pages in /usr/man, and that
this is usually a good place to start looking for documentation about a
given function. So when I tried looking for the lockf(3) pages, to find
out exactly how non-portable lockf is, I tried this on a SGI Indigo
yesterday:michael: man lockf