Does man even provide a 'Table of Contents'?
The command 'man' without parameters errors out with "What manual page do you want?" and 'man man' only provides syntax help. It would be better for less experienced Linux users, if either of these commands provides a browsable table of contents/index, or at least provide a clue/reference to the proper tool for this purpose.
man "regex(7)"ยป'No manual entry for regex(7)'
Many websites and man-pages refer only to the round bracket notation to point at different manual sections, even though the 'man' command refuses to process this notation. Instead it must be requested as 'man --sections 7 regex' or simply 'man 7 regex'. It would be better to be able to use the round bracket notation on the command line directly.
| Default section search order: | Command | Purpose |
| 1 | man --sections 1 intro | executable user reference |
| 8 | man --sections 8 intro | |
| 3 | man --sections 3 intro | programmer's reference (libc) |
| 2 | man --sections 2 intro | |
| 5 | man --sections 5 intro | |
| 4 | man --sections 4 intro | |
| 9 | man --sections 9 intro | |
| 6 | man --sections 6 intro | |
| 7 | man --sections 7 intro | miscellaneous user reference |
man and '-?' rarely provide useful summaries
It would be better for less experienced Linux users if the most common and shortest shell snippets and summaries would be listed upmost, rather than in seemingly random order.
sh's context help feels barely intuitive (unless installing 'sudo apt-get install bash-completion')
- eg. does "tar j" mean gzip or bzip?
- eg. comes the folder or the search pattern parameter first after grep?
Pro
'/bin/sh' is a shell available on (almost) and all Linux distribution. It would be a great help to newbies if it (or any forked shells) would provide automatic syntax completion and syntax help, just like most programming Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) provide (for example using CTRL-space/CTRL+SHIFT-space). This way the user not needs to resort to 'man' or 'help' or 'info' all the time, which don't provide manageable information anyway to most less experienced users.