Too Long, Didn't Read - locate

General Linux Question
1

I remember reading about, and installing another shortened man page reading system, that WAS NOT "tldr’… This was quite recently, but probably several distropopping adventures ago…

I just installed TLDR - but it doesn’t have a tldr entry for the locate command.

I’m fed up of “find”, you’d a thunk by now they might have figured a way to avoid having to use escapes… so I was going to use locate, but I’m too lazy and easily distracted to read a whole man page to figure out how to use it - back in the 'old" Solaris days I would often use man, because Solaris man pages had excellent practical example usages at the end of each man page…

Anyone know / remember that alternative to TLDR… I’m pretty sure it didn’t have a dictionary like TLDR seems to - it just presented an abridged more user friendly version of the actual man page…

Hmmm, maybe I dreamt it?

And it looks like locate isn’t even an alternative to find… oh well… back to find and escaping shell characters I suppose :smiley:

2

Try tealdeer. Its written in rust.

Also for find

also in rust… and in the true Unix tradition… only 2 letters to type

1 Like
3

I just saw ‘fd’ in an IT’S FOSS article yesterday.

I gave it a quick try, but muscle memory takes time to convert.

1 Like
4

Bropages is TLDR alternative http://bropages.org/

I am not quite sure if that is the thing that you were trying to remember.

5

That’s the one - cheers mate!

6

There’s also “cheat” and “tealdeer” (it’s a port of tldr to rust) :

Both above are heaps easier to install on MacOS (via homebrew) than Ubuntu…

From my work MacBook Pro M1 :

╭─datripp@loge.local ~
╰─➤  cheat tar
# To extract an uncompressed archive:
tar -xvf /path/to/foo.tar

# To extract a .tar in specified directory:
tar -xvf /path/to/foo.tar -C /path/to/destination/

# To create an uncompressed archive:
tar -cvf /path/to/foo.tar /path/to/foo/

# To extract a .tgz or .tar.gz archive:
tar -xzvf /path/to/foo.tgz
tar -xzvf /path/to/foo.tar.gz

# To create a .tgz or .tar.gz archive:
tar -czvf /path/to/foo.tgz /path/to/foo/
tar -czvf /path/to/foo.tar.gz /path/to/foo/

# To list the content of an .tgz or .tar.gz archive:
tar -tzvf /path/to/foo.tgz
tar -tzvf /path/to/foo.tar.gz

# To extract a .tar.bz2 archive:
tar -xjvf /path/to/foo.tar.bz2

# To create a .tar.bz2 archive:
tar -cjvf /path/to/foo.tar.bz2 /path/to/foo/

# To list the content of an .tar.bz2 archive:
tar -tjvf /path/to/foo.tar.bz2

# To create a .tgz archive and exclude all jpg,gif,... from the tgz:
tar -czvf /path/to/foo.tgz --exclude=\*.{jpg,gif,png,wmv,flv,tar.gz,zip} /path/to/foo/

# To use parallel (multi-threaded) implementation of compression algorithms:
tar -z ... -> tar -Ipigz ...
tar -j ... -> tar -Ipbzip2 ...
tar -J ... -> tar -Ipixz ...

# To append a new file to an old tar archive:
tar -rf <archive.tar> <new-file-to-append>
(END)
1 Like
7

All of this seems to be to make up for stuff that should have been in the man pages Example section , in the first place.

Its amazing the lengths people will go to to avoid writing a simple man page. Sure you have to learn an arcane nroff dialect, but the learning curve is only about half an hour. Even GNU opted to minimize man pages and use info instead. This forking of documentation is not good for Linux.

8

100% - this is why, even though I GROAN and CRINGE when I’m occasionally called out to do stuff on Solaris, and then I remember you can’t do a case INSENSITIVE find in Solaris - WTF?

But - even way back when, Solaris 2.5 (SysV), SunOS 4.1x (BSD) - the man pages ALWAYS (well nearly) had examples!

Which reminds me - I HATED it when colleagues in their “infinite wisdom” when a Solaris machine’s got a full disk - DELETE THE F-CKING MAN PAGES"! WTF?

Oh - you mean I can just find another Solaris machine that you haven’t also gone to, and deleted the man pages on (you FUCKING cowboy!) - and even though I’m in the middle of a P1 emergency in a noisy data centre computer room (where I’m NOT allowed to use my mobile phone in case it upsets all the legacy DEC VAX shite), and the machine I’m trying to rescue has no network connectivity and I’m using a Wyse or DEC VT100 ASCII terminal… What? So I should disconnect the ASCII terminal and hook it up to a Solaris machine that still has man pages and hope it’s the same version of Solaris?

What really got my goat back then was the very idea of getting more space back by deleting TINY little text files (man pages are only VERY slightly larger than the same text as a raw text file!).

1 Like
9

There is hope.
when I submit an R package to CRAN, if the help page is missing, or does not contain at least one example, it is rejected.
Result: Every R help page comes with an example.

Linux needs a bit of policy and screening for this sort of stuff.

1 Like