The day has come, and I’ve started writing documentation, but this time Linux style. In other words, I’ve just created the manual pages for my Newbie-projects, “ogc” and “go“.
Some important points I’ve learned from the Linux Man Page Howto:
Manual pages are written in the “groff” (GNU troff) markup language. Just start from another program’s man page, it’ll be easy.
Manual pages of user-commands shall be installed into “/usr/share/man/man1″
The manual page of user-program “foo” shall be called either “foo.1″ or “foo.1.gz” (gzipped).
To read foo’s manual page, type
man foo
It’s that easy.
We all remember from the Tao of Programming when the master programmer avoided an embarrassing question about the presence of Tao in DOS. The good news is there is definitely Tao in Windows (but not too much).
It’s called “start“.
It’s not the Start Menu, but a command-line keyword, obviously. I’ve come to appreciate its beauty only after having spent some weeks with Ubuntu. I kept looking for something similar on the internet, and all I found was the “gnome-open” command. Still, the blog-post has ecstatic comments.
I tried “gnome-open”. It opened any file or URL with the associated program as an independent process. So far so good. Until I tried to start a program with “gnome-open”. No way. This was the moment I discovered Tao in Windows’ “start”. Let’s see:
“start” without arguments will open a new terminal window.
“start” with a CLI program as an argument will open it in a new fully independent terminal window.
“start” with a Windows program as an argument will open just that in a fully independent window.
“start” with a file or URL as an argument will open it with the preferred application.
“gnome-open” can do the latter, but not the first three options. So I decided to write my Linux-version of “start” called “go”. Please go to the page.
Back to Windows. The famous “start” has a significant drawback. As in Windows nearly none of the applications are on the PATH, start’s capabilities are just a tiny bit limited. Not so with “go”.
