I got bored, and wondered which man pages on my laptop were longest.

After rereading the section in the bash info page and bash-builtins man page, I finally got read working. I hardly ever use read in loops, prefering for loops on input, but I felt like this was the less awkward way to do things.

So I hacked this together.

First we check our example input:

$ man -k sudo
sudo (8)             - execute a command as another user
sudo.conf (5)        - configuration for sudo front end
sudo_plugin (8)      - Sudo Plugin API
sudoedit (8)         - execute a command as another user
sudoers (5)          - default sudo security policy plugin
sudoreplay (8)       - replay sudo session logs
visudo (8)           - edit the sudoers file

Now we dice it into a section and page, so we can invoke man section page to get the right manual. This is needed to handle things like crontab that is a file(5) and a tool(1) for managing it. I just search for space hoping that gives all the manpages:

man -k \  > manpages.list
while read;
do
   page=$(echo $REPLY | awk '{print $1}');
   section=$(echo $REPLY | awk '{print $2}' | tr -d '()');
   echo $(man $section $page | wc -w) $page;
   unset page;   unset section;
 done < manpages.list  | sort -n

For reference, manpages.list was 7618 lines long. I’m sure there’s a much smarter way to do multiple assignment (Read says it takes a list of variables, but every time I tested it, it seems like it failed to assign anything, so I opted for the REPLY default).

The worst offender was gcc (that’s a pile of options that all matter), and it was listed twice (man gcc and man gcc-4.9 should give the same page. cc, c++, g++, gcc are all one page with many names).

  • 107994 c++
  • 107994 cc
  • 107994 g++
  • 107994 g++-4.9
  • 107994 gcc
  • 107994 gcc-4.9

The next bunch were for wider range of tools, bash being just under 50,000 words. I usually joke about rsync having a painfully long man page (and a bewildering set of options) so this was my measuring stick for complexity. xterm somehow has more to say than rsync, but reading that page suggests the xterm manual is covering the configuration language for the terminal emulator. I’ve foolishly equated xterm with an internal “produce command prompt in black window on screen” command, but it has a lot more going on internally, comparable to minicom. Mercurial has a monolithic man page (git splits its apart, so it’s hard to see the complexity in this list), cmake appears to have multiple distinct sections like git, but each with as much to say as tools like nmap or rsync.

  • 25252 nmap
  • 27400 openvpn
  • 27579 rsync
  • 28717 cmake-commands
  • 30558 mplayer
  • 32164 xterm
  • 34672 Net::SSLeay
  • 41662 hg
  • 41944 cmake-modules
  • 44536 bash

Indeed, git breaks things up substantially. There are 158 git related commands in the man database. Taken in total this outweighs gcc’s options, but some of that is surely boilerplate.

Here’s the tail of just the git commands:

  • 4743 git
  • 5084 gitattributes
  • 5230 git-diff-index
  • 5382 git-diff
  • 5535 gitweb.conf
  • 5824 git-show
  • 5996 git-rev-list
  • 6860 git-diff-tree
  • 8648 git-fast-import
  • 9818 gitcore-tutorial
  • 10335 git-log
  • 18865 git-config

Cmake has a more restricted vocabulary:

  • 824 cmake-toolchains
  • 900 cmake-generator-expressions
  • 929 cmake-qt
  • 1405 cmake-generators
  • 1799 cmake
  • 2230 cmake-language
  • 2738 cmake-packages
  • 3613 cmake-buildsystem
  • 3757 cmake-developer
  • 8090 cmake-policies
  • 11600 cmake-variables
  • 15453 cmake-properties
  • 28717 cmake-commands
  • 41944 cmake-modules

So none of this means anything, but it was a thought experiment. xkcd regards the sudoers(5) page as the worst read. It may be horribly dense, but it’s not overly long:

man 5 sudoers | wc -w
15151