Time to shut down this list?

[Scott Emerson Longley]

On Thu, 23 Dec 2004, Nikolas Britton wrote:

> 
> > Speaking of "help" I have always though this sould at least be an 
> > alise to man (or "man man", or "man %foo")... but what I really want a 
> > clone of the MSDOS 6.xx Help system of the same name, when you typed 
> > in help with no args. it would load a "hypertext" curses program that 
> > listed all the commands (like "whatis") and then you could select a 
> > command for detail info about it. anyways... in the DOS world you 
> > always type'd "help, "help foo", or "foo /?" for help so for most 
> > people new to unix and freebsd whatis and man are unknow to them.
> 
> 
> I may have a simple solution to this: create a new man page named 
> "help", in this man page is a brief (newbie oriented) one page guide on 
> how to use the man pages and how to find commands to use (whatis / 
> apropos, btw who came up with that name? I could not remember it if my 
> life depended on it). this man page would then be aliased as "help". 
> what do yea think?

IMO, that's a great idea. Actually, OpenBSD does it, so it might be a 
useful example. ( http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=help )
Not having a "help" command was a frustration to me a few years back when 
I had just started fooling with Unices, so I would like to see the idea 
catch on for the sake of all those who are in that position now.

			-Scott Longley