# man

15 Hacker News commenters recommended man and 6 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 8 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Recommended for its useful, searchable reference pages, including man -k for finding the right section. Common caveat: arcane and frustrating to use.

## Why people recommend it

- Finds the right section with man -k (2 comments): "man -k crontab is the real trick here. shows both sections so you don't have to already know the number exists." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47660823)) "Man -k is often good for this" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50107546))
- Detailed, thorough documentation (2 comments): "For actual documentation man pages and info documents are pretty awesome." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46828685)) "Both tell you in detail what the flag and utility do." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47662460))

## What people warn about

- Search limited to literal strings (2 comments): "it's paged content in a terminal which can search only for literal strings" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48552866)) "Silently destroying our ability to grep it should NOT be the default." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47338032))
- Too complex, assumes prior knowledge (2 comments): "you have to already know about the existence of eui-64 to know that is what you want" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45988168)) "the official docs (man pages for POSIX, MSDN for Win32 etc.) are way too complex" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46145040))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [tldr](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tldr.md): 11 recommend
- [GNU Info](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gnu-info.md): 7 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "man", https://hackerapproved.com/p/man/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).