Re: What to do when not understanding man pages?

[Richard Owlett <rowlett@cloud85.net>]

Jochen Spieker wrote:
> Richard Owlett:
> > When using gunzip I got an unexpected result. The result of "gunzip
> > myfile.gz" was a single file named "myfile". What I expected/desired
> > was to have two files on the disk - "myfile.gz" and "myfile". There
> > was only one - "myfile". Reading the man page seemed to indicate
> > that was the _only_ possible result?
>
> Yes. But you can use shell redirection plus the -c switch:
>
> gunzip -c myfile.gz > myfile

<GRIN> It's been too long since I used CP/M-80. Piping and 
redirection was routine.

> > My problem with the dpkg-scanpackages man pages is that I don't seem
> > to be able to apply it correctly to my situation. I need some more
> > detail examples and that is NOT the function of man pages.
>
> If the EXAMPLES section doesn't contain your (reasonable) use cases you
> can always ask here and then submit a proposal as a bug report against
> the Debian package. Cannot comment on dpkg-scanpackages, though.

To borrow from the hardware world, man pages would correspond to 
Product Specification. What I'm looking for would correspond more 
with an Application Note.

> > Underlying question:
> > What to do when man &/or info do not satisfy?
>
> Ask in the relevant place. Any questions regarding Debian tools are
> appropriate for this list. Other questions (like for shell scripting)
> are mostly tolerated here as well as long as they are not specific to
> some other distribution or require domain specific knowledge apart from
> general user / sysadmin tasks.
>
> > Google can only help sometimes - it value depends strongly on
> > guessing appropriate set of keywords.
>
> Don't worry, you will learn to guess the right keywords.
>
> J.