... because if you do `man crontab` you get section 1, which does not document the crontab fields.

In fact, the only reference to crontab(5) is in the SEE ALSO section (on my version anyway), but that doesn't say why you might want to see crontab(5), just that it exists. That is spectacularly useless

> That is spectacularly useless

Depends. If one is aware of the meaning of section numbers, that "(5)" is very obviously suggesting that there is a file format named "crontab" which is documented. It's also pretty reasonable to suppose that the command and the file format of the same name are related.

A novice might miss the convention and the connection. Man pages are not quite novice material.

Hell, you don't even have to have a handle on what the section numbers mean for these things to be useful. The appearance of something in a "SEE ALSO" section indicates that the manual page author thought that that thing was both related to the thing being documented and worth reading if the current man page didn't answer all of your questions.

I can't count the number of times that following the trail laid out by 'SEE ALSO' sections a step or three has lead me to the exact thing that I never knew I needed to be using. Chasing those sections down is almost always well worth the three to ten minutes spent.

And, like, if one is expecting a man page to cover in detail everything even vaguely related to what it documents, and one doesn't feel one has ten minutes to spend reading things that people thought were important to bring to your attention... well, I guess one could go ask an LLM to slop out some related words. That'll probably take less than ten minutes, though correctness is not at all guaranteed.

That is incredibly stupid. A documentation system designed by someone who doesn't understand how people use documentation.

If man was designed by someone with any taste at all it would at least give you a menu to select (1) crontab command, (5) crontab file format. Maybe we need a rewrite in Rust to fix that.

It seems it has been done already a while ago without waiting for the rust community to do their usual churn.

https://imgur.com/a/kEkmRxx (link shows a screenshot of khelpcenter showing the different manpages available for crontab)

There are a multitude of manpagers and viewers and frontends. It's one of those things you can write yourself very easily.

> If man was designed by someone with any taste at all it would at least give you a menu [...]

My goodness. Man was written on a paper teletype.

And since man pages could take minutes to print out, if you needed one you'd tear that section of paper off and keep it in a binder for future (and faster) reference.

Or a minor alteration to an existing program to support a good suggestion.

Why is it that the Rust community thinks that the solution to every flaw in an application is a rewrite in Rust?

It might be more helpful to write a Rust-based snark detector first.

Could be, but I don't think so in this case given a cursory review of the parent poster's history.

It does that, depending on implementation.

man -k crontab is the real trick here. shows both sections so you don't have to already know the number exists.

It only shows a description though.

Incidentally, man --help on my machine shows "-k, --apropos equivalent to apropos", which isn't very useful. I know the two are equivalent, because they're on the same line of switches, what does it actually do?

With some further man digging, apropos is actually a separate program that looks through man page names/descriptions for the argument. Unless you run it with no arguments, in which case it just outputs "apropos what?" Instead of an actual error message like "No search term provided" or something

> Incidentally, man --help on my machine shows "-k, --apropos equivalent to apropos", which isn't very useful.

That's your hint to execute either 'man apropos' or 'man man'. Both tell you in detail what the flag and utility do.

You seem likely to be very disappointed in the '-h'/'-H' output of utilities from the BSD tradition. The output is often a list of all of the (almost always exclusively short) options presented as a sea of characters... and nothing else.

This post inspired me to add SSH host key signing to WeEncrypt (formerly LessEncrypt): https://github.com/linsomniac/weencrypt

I assume you say that in jest, but back in the early '90s I was seriously considering getting a major in psychology and a minor in CS for the fairly hot Human Factors jobs.

Ditto, I made a "/codex-review" skill in Claude Code that reviews the last git commit and writes an analysis of it for Claude Code to then work. I've had very good luck with it.

One particularly striking example: I had CC do some work and then kicked off a "/codex-review" and while it was running went to test the changes. I found a deadlock but when I switched back to CC the Codex review had found the deadlock and Claude Code was already working on a fix.

The article doesn't say they found a bunch of false positives. It says they have a huge backlog that they still need to test:

"I have so many bugs in the Linux kernel that I can’t report because I haven’t validated them yet…"

In our dev/stg environment we reinstall half our machines every morning (largely to test our machine setup automation), and SSH host certificates make that so much nicer than having to persist host keys or remove/replace them in known_hosts. Highly recommended.

Yes, it says on that page that it uses Apple Intelligence from Tahoe. I'm also hanging onto Sequoia, though I'm ready to make the leap any time here.

MacBook Neo forced me to finally make the jump, and it turns out that I, much like the engineers at Apple, don't really care about the spit and finish anymore. Third-party applications handle everything else. Also, I was happy to find that Divvy still runs just fine under Rosetta.

>Email(smtp) is not a bad choice for messaging in space

Email (Taylor UUCP g protocol) is a better choice for messaging in space. Resuming partial transmission is great! I used it up until ~2010 and it worked really great on some very, very crappy connections (modems, obviously, CDPD, phone tethering in spotty locations, bad WiFi setups)...

My HT radio has a mode (I've never tried) for talking to satellites. It uses the GPS to get the radio location, and then manages doppler shift for the frequency as it's coming toward or going away from you. So you'd likely need something in your WiFi connection to Artemis/Integrity to deal with that.