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man vs --help

where did all the manuals go

man vs --help

I was recently thinking about when was the last time i used man to read a man page. Turns out it was quite a while ago and going further back in my shell history it's also quite infrequent. This wasn't always the case, I recall using it a lot more in my early days, when I did a lot more linux related things. Instead, using --help or the somewhat dreaded help subcommand appears much more often, or having to visit some website for online docs.

Thinking about why, maybe it's the set of tools I use now: there's more cloud / server software to run, and these are all containerized, so they aren't installed locally, and neither would their man pages be available if they had any. Related to containerization is the distribution of software, whereas a lot of core utilities come packaged in distros which will happily add man pages as part of the install process, lots of new tools are a lot more self contained, and maybe built from source, where man pages won't get installed for you.