The manual for tar on my machine is 1025 lines long whereas bash’s manual has 4728. gawk’s manual is likewise light at 1723. (Measured with screen width of 120 chars)
It looks like some of the manuals on that site are super in-depth versions - practically books - rather than PDF versions of the man versions.
For example, tar’s has several pages dedicated to the GNU Free Documentation License which is very much not part of the command line version. Add a few more sections like that and things soon add up.
A lot of info manuals are really extensive. I read a good chunk of the info manual for sed a while back and it is very thorough. It’s always annoying though when I go to check man for something quick and all you can get are texinfo pages. Luckily that isn’t too common anymore. I think GNU caught on that it was annoying.
OK a lot of them I can get behind, but wtf is the deal with tar at 262 pages or so.
The manual for
taron my machine is 1025 lines long whereasbash’s manual has 4728.gawk’s manual is likewise light at 1723. (Measured with screen width of 120 chars)It looks like some of the manuals on that site are super in-depth versions - practically books - rather than PDF versions of the
manversions.For example,
tar’s has several pages dedicated to the GNU Free Documentation License which is very much not part of the command line version. Add a few more sections like that and things soon add up.That’s because the link is measuring the length of the info docs, not the man pages.
A lot of info manuals are really extensive. I read a good chunk of the info manual for sed a while back and it is very thorough. It’s always annoying though when I go to check man for something quick and all you can get are texinfo pages. Luckily that isn’t too common anymore. I think GNU caught on that it was annoying.