Recommendation to Instructors about man because it doesn't work in Windows about shell-novice HOT 9 CLOSED

On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 06:22:55PM -0800, Raniere Silva wrote:

Windows doesn't have man installed. To improve the experience of
our students that use Windows machines we should use command --help instead of man command and make a few changes in the write
version of our shell lesson.

• In 06-find.md, replace man grep with grep --help.

Ugh. Can't we just suggest they use the web to get the man page?
E.g. 1. We may be able to script that up in a little man stub using
Python's webbrowser 2 and install the script using our Windows
installer. For Git, it doesn't matter if you use ‘man’ or ‘--help’,
but on my system grep(1) is 649 lines of useful explanation (e.g. it
talks about character classes, bracket expressions, regexp anchoring,
…) and ‘grep --help’ is 76 lines of compact usage information.

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Can't we just suggest they use the web to get the man page?

I'm OK with using the web. This is just a suggestion that @dbarneche gave me.

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Learners frequently can't get on wireless during workshops, either
because they're from a different institution, or because university
wireless can't handle the load, or just because. We should therefore
tell people about both man and google.

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On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 04:57:54AM -0800, Greg Wilson wrote:

Learners frequently can't get on wireless during workshops, either
because they're from a different institution, or because university
wireless can't handle the load, or just because. We should
therefore tell people about both man and google.

So I'd tell leaners:

1. Use ‘man’ if you have it, since it's easy to run and gives detailed
   advice. If you don't have it, fall back to…
2. A man page (or other docs if you can find them) posted online.
   More work to find, but you get man-page-quality advice. If you
   don't have network access or can't find the appropriate docs, fall
   back to…
3. ‘--help’, which will usualy get you the command syntax. That may
   be enough to jog your memory. If you're lucky (e.g for Git), the
   --help will be as useful (or exactly the same as ;) the man page
   ;).

And I'd leave it up to instructors to gloss over any bits they felt
weren't pertinent to their class (e.g. don't mention ‘man’ if all your
students are Windows users who are masochistically learning about the
POSIX shell ;).

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I updated the description of this issue since I believe that we could agree with @wking's last comment.

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This is also referenced in (old) PR #24.

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Should we add a link to the GNU Bash site man page? https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/
We might want to add this link to either the shell lessons, the instructor notes, or the workshop template.

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Yes please, PR's welcome :)

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Resolved.

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