I’m a big fan of UNIX man pages¹. They are almost without exception well-written and concise, and the intuition you gain for particular topics as you browse through the man pages is well worth the effort. In contrast, many developers shoot straight to googling the answer for the problem at hand.

I argue this is counter-intuitive - one ends up with poor-quality StackOverflow answers and the intended use of applications is often left as a mystery to the developer.

Even the “I don’t have time for reading through pages of manuals” argument does not hold, since there’s a learning curve involved in navigating man pages - the more you do it, the better you become at it.

Anyway, this post is about funny bits I’ve found in man pages. Without further ado, here’s some of them, in no particular order:

The manpage for gnupg has

--gen-prime mode bits
        Use the source, Luke :-). The output format is still subject to change.

crontab has

# run at 10 pm on weekdays, annoy Joe
0 22 * * 1-5    mail -s "It's 10pm" joe%Joe,%%Where are your kids?%

xxd :

WARNINGS
       The  tools weirdness matches its creators brain.  Use entirely at your own risk. Copy files. Trace it. Become
       a wizard.

This one is lengthier, but underlines the pragmatism of the UNIX philosophy. From man git-tag:

What should you do when you tag a wrong commit and you would want to re-tag?

If you never pushed anything out, just re-tag it. Use "-f" to replace the old one. And you’re done.

But if you have pushed things out (or others could just read your repository directly), then others will
have already seen the old tag. In that case you can do one of two things:

1. The sane thing. Just admit you screwed up, and use a different name. Others have already seen one
   tag-name, and if you keep the same name, you may be in the situation that two people both have "version
   X", but they actually have different "X"'s. So just call it "X.1" and be done with it.

2. The insane thing. You really want to call the new version "X" too, even though others have already seen
   the old one. So just use git tag -f again, as if you hadn’t already published the old one.

From tcpdump:

       -f     Print `foreign' IPv4 addresses numerically rather than symbolically (this option  is  intended  to  get  around
	                 serious brain damage in Sun's NIS server — usually it hangs forever translating non-local internet numbers).

The developers of iptables have a care-free attitude towards bugs:

BUGS
       Bugs?  What's this? ;-) Well, you might want to have a look at http://bugzilla.netfilter.org/

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Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_page ↩