[frankhhhhhhhhh]

It's too bad most man pages don't include anything in the EXAMPLES section.

[chrisallenlane]

This was essentially my primary motivation for writing `cheat`. The `man` pages are thorough, but often lack examples demonstrating the common use-cases.

I eventually tired of Googling "how to extract a tarball" (because I'm too lazy to read the lengthy manpage), and decided to create some supplemental tooling.

[BossingAround]

My biggest pet peeve! I have a feeling that in the past, man pages used to be much more detailed when it comes to actual examples.

[JJMcJ]

The feeling that a single actual example would make the whole thing a million times clearer.

Sometimes there's also an `info` file with more detail.

And one of my pet peeves. Do a search "How to briwyw the gomleqq" and the first one you look at has screen after screen of how to install Linux and everything and then finally at the very bottom it is finally revealed

    gomleqq --briwyw 40 --eiei-dddd 9

and that's the little bit of knowledge that I needed all along, along with that fact that 40 needs to be at least 4 times bigger than 9 or you'll get dropped packets.

[gumby]

As a Unix user since around 1980 I can reassure you that man pages these days are far more extensive than they used to be.

[marcosdumay]

My impression is that people stopped filling their man pages because the information got into info pages when there was an ongoing campaign to create those (because the format was much more expressible).

And then, the users simply didn't learn how to use info, so developers dropped those and kept only the very short man pages.

[cptnapalm]

In a recent discussion of fzf, I looked through the man page and still didn't know what it was supposed to do. An example might have helped.

[t0astbread]

That kinda makes me think if it would be possible to write a tool that patches these cheat sheets into man pages that don't yet have an EXAMPLES section.