On Sun, Nov 2, 2014 at 9:35 PM, The Wanderer <wanderer@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> On 11/02/2014 at 03:23 AM, Joel Rees wrote:
>
>> 2014/11/02 11:19 "Carl Fink" <carl@finknetwork.com>:
>>
>>> When I wanted the options for umask, I typed 'man umask' and got
>>> the man page for it as a C header diretive? (I'm not a C
>>> programmer, but it seemed to be for C header files and came from
>>> section 2.)
>>>
>>> This is darn confusing for a new user. I have been around long
>>> enough (slink) that I quickly realized it must be a Bash builtin
>>> and found that man page, but how would a beginner know that? Surely
>>> a symbolic link could be set up for umask as well as the others
>>> (bg, eval, fg, read, etc.)?
>>>
>>> Should I file this as a bug against Sid? I know there's no chance
>>> it will make it into Wheezy.
>>
>> Hmm. What do I get when I try to do a man umask?
>>
>> BASH_BUILTINS (1)
>>
>> I wonder why. I have a memory of doing something like installing a
>> manpages package, but I'm not sure that was what did the trick, or
>> it might have been mingw I did that on.
>
> Could you check with dlocate or similar to figure out where that came
> from?
Hmm. Oh. This is not going to be generally useful, at all.
man /usr/share/man/ja/man1/builtins.1.gz
brings the page up for me.
env LANG=en_US.UTF-8 man umask
brings up the manual page from section 2, and
env LANG=en_US.UTF-8 man 7 umask
doesn't bring up anything here.
man bash
does, for either LANG .
> The closest man page I have to that is bash-builtins(7), which comes
> with the bash package, but is not the same as bash_builtins(1) - and
> does not have an umask(anything) symlink.
Seems to be done, not by symlink, but in the man db.
>> Wheezy, FWIW.
>>
>> (And thanks to The Wanderer for reminding us about the help command.
>> I keep forgetting that.)
>
> Heh. I think the reason I learned about it in a way which helps me keep
> remembering it myself is due to experimenting based on a line from the
> "Draft of the UNIX Hierarchy", describing someone at one level of the
> hierarchy as having "learned that learn doesn't help".
>
> I have never found a command called 'learn', or otherwise figured out
> what this might have been referring to, but it's memorable enough that
> the experimentation I did based on it is also easy to bring back to mind
> - and I'm pretty sure that I found 'help' while experimenting that way.
I think there was an OS back way back when, that had a "learn" command. (As in, "I want to `learn' about <topic />.") Don't remember which, though. Or it might have been an app.
--
Joel Rees
Be careful when you look at conspiracy.
Look first in your own heart,
and ask yourself if you are not your own worst enemy.
Arm yourself with knowledge of yourself, as well.