{"id":664,"date":"2008-05-13T09:00:35","date_gmt":"2008-05-13T14:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/2008\/05\/13\/why-does-rtfm-with-gnu-manpages-just-s"},"modified":"2008-05-13T09:00:35","modified_gmt":"2008-05-13T14:00:35","slug":"why-does-rtfm-with-gnu-manpages-just-suck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/2008\/05\/13\/why-does-rtfm-with-gnu-manpages-just-suck\/","title":{"rendered":"Why does RTFM with GNU manpages just suck"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After looking at a seriously useful tip for <a href=\"http:\/\/woss.name\/2003\/10\/15\/cleaning-out-the-postfix-mail-queue\/\">cleaning out a clogged postfix queue<\/a> I puzzled over the <em>-r<\/em> option in xargs.  I&#8217;m not an xargs master but I figure if I need it I can always RTFM.<\/p>\n<p>Well <em>man xargs<\/em> on my Ubuntu box provides the typical GNU fair and I spend the next way too long time period looking for where the <em>-r<\/em> option is.  (The full option is <em>&#8211;no-run-if-empty<\/em>).<\/p>\n<p>Sadly, I ended up finding it faster with a Google search on this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hcidata.info\/find.htm\">web page<\/a> that has some find-fu and xargs then looking again at the GNU manpage and finally find the option buried just before the EXAMPLES section.<\/p>\n<p>I guess I should be happy this time around, there are some GNU manpages that don&#8217;t even HAVE documentation (at least compared to the *BSD brethren).  Grrrrrr<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After looking at a seriously useful tip for cleaning out a clogged postfix queue I puzzled over the -r option in xargs. I&#8217;m not an xargs master but I figure if I need it I can always RTFM. Well man xargs on my Ubuntu box provides the typical GNU fair and I spend the next [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":703,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1215,1217,1099],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gripe","category-stupid","category-unix"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/703"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}