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I see no benefit whatsoever to web docs over man pages. man pages are immediately available, where you are (the CLI) without an internet connection or a web browser.

I expect the -h flag to give me a summary of the flags and arguments, to remind me of the particular name of the flag I'm missing. I most certainly don't want the whole documentation there, partly because the whole documentation is (presumably) large enough to scroll my history off screen.

So, yes, man pages are definitely more important than web or in-cli docs.



In my limited experience, manpages give you a wall of text when 9/10 times you just want a oneliner example of how to do something. Web resources generally address the lack of real world examples in manpages.


Then you use your pager's search functionality and go to the EXAMPLES section. If there is no EXAMPLES section, that's not the fault of the format, but of the author. Presumably, the same author would be equally good (or bad) at providing examples no matter if the target format was a man page or a web page.




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