I strongly disagree on this one too.

That's the first place I look for help and it annoys me to no end when a CLI program that doesn't come with one.

I stopped taking seriously the article at that point and quickly skimmed through the rest of it.

Man pages are a great unix culture heritage, please new developers don't give up on them!

Moreover, man pages serve as an essential resource that is much more reliably available than any other - when my network's routing packets in circles, the database server's on fire, and the duplicate has repeated the last transaction on every record, I don't care how "most users" don't use man pages or that web documentation is much more Google-able; I care that I have access to complete, detailed information (not the abbreviated version provided by --help) on all the utilities available to me; I care that apropos can help me recall the names of utilities I don't remember (something the article does not address); I care that I don't have to worry about having access to documentation, in addition to everything else, because it's all in a single, standardized, effective repository of man pages.

I really can't express strongly enough how much I disagree with the view that man pages are no longer relevant or necessary.

I myself also love reading man pages, but speaking of compatibility, I have to say that “--help” is a more universal way of showing help pages. Of course it’s better to have both of them though.

--help is fine, but almost never a substitute for a full man page, except for the most trivial of applications (unless your --help is as complete as a man page, in which case... good on you for providing full documentation, but I'll hate you a bit every time I unthinkingly drop two hundred lines of text in my terminal.)

Unless it just opens the man page if it is so long. Like git.

I strongly suspect that --help is on the contrary less universal, given that there exist entire toolsets lacking the --help convention but having manual pages. There was almost a quarter of a century's worth of Unix tools that developed before --help was invented.

* https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/416796/5132

* https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/207136/

How can you say it's less universal when it doesn't work on windows?

When man pages are good, they're good. When they are bad, they are super verbose, incomprehensible, sparse, or otherwise completely useless.

I never read man pages. If I need to check man, the tool failed in being user friendly. I'll then rather search online for what I need and blindly copy the first result on some stack exchange page..

If you can't immediately figure out how to properly set up and adjust a contractor's table saw, do you blame the table saw for being developed for professional contractors instead of newbies?

User friendlyness is a feature, and like all features it's not always worth adding to professional tools.

> I don't know where this is coming from

From people who don't know how to use man pages.

BSD manpages or Linux manpages? There are very few Linux manpages that I'd consider acceptable.

man pages are the first place I'm looking in for flags for commands I know for years, or when I'm using new commands — and it's always a frustrating experience when they don't exist.

Please, always ship man pages with whatever you write. It's /easy/ to do and has a great added value.

PS: doc on the web is so often irrelevant… either too old, or too recent — and in the rare cases where it's properly versioned, the workflow is something like “cmd --version ; google cmd $version” instead of just “man cmd”, which is nowhere as convenient or reliable.

Whether they're good or not, i feel manpages should ALWAYS be included every cli app. That being said, it is quite often that i begin my inquiry with manpages but then have to unfortunately look elsewhere for more info...specifically either a nice set of usage examples, or a bit more background on the "why" to use the cli app - in this order.

Nix commands show their man pages as their help, e.g. `nix-shell --help` is equivalent to `man nix-shell`. I think this works well, and reduces the burden of writing the same documentation over and over.

As you're getting mostly replies agreeing - I never read man pages. I look up the odd parameter every now and then though.

Do you mean you look up parameters somewhere else, e.g. in a web browser using google?

Pretty much, yes.