I was playing today with info and man with some friends over some Discord server and we discovered the following:
milia@Newton:~/Downloads/apljk/apljk-related-repos$ man info | tail
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
SEE ALSO
The full documentation for info is provided by the texinfo-doc-nonfree package as a Texinfo manual. If this package is installed at your site, the command
info info
should give you access to the complete manual. (Or, if you have Emacs, M-x info will lead to the manual.)
info 6.5
The issue:
In my utter disappointment I found out that when I do `info info` I get the following:
milia@Newton:~/Downloads/apljk/apljk-related-repos$ info info
info: No menu item 'info-stnd' in node '(dir)Top'
From the look of it, there's no info for info.
But then I did man man and I got a result:
milia@Newton:~/Downloads/apljk/apljk-related-repos$ man man | head
MAN(1) Manual pager utils MAN(1)
NAME
man - an interface to the on-line reference manuals
SYNOPSIS
man [-C file] [-d] [-D] [--warnings[=warnings]] [-R encoding] [-L locale] [-m system[,...]] [-M path] [-S list] [-e extension] [-i|-I] [--regex|--wildcard]
[--names-only] [-a] [-u] [--no-subpages] [-P pager] [-r prompt] [-7] [-E encoding] [--no-hyphenation] [--no-justification] [-p string] [-t] [-T[device]] [-H[browser]]
[-X[dpi]] [-Z] [[section] page[.section] ...] ...
man -k [apropos options] regexp ...
I find this insulting for the info community. How can you stand the fact that the man community has a man for their man, and yet you don't have an info for your info?
Also, there's a `man info`, as is an `info man`. Which is nice. But I get the same weird error that I got with `info info`, when I run the `info man`.
milia@Newton:~/Downloads/apljk/apljk-related-repos$ man info | wc -l
99
milia@Newton:~/Downloads/apljk/apljk-related-repos$ info man | wc -l
info: No menu item 'man' in node '(dir)Top'
676
A friend from the friendly community I belong to pointed out that this error could mean that there isn't an info page for man, and so that the info takes the `man man` and returns it as info . But we see that there is an info page for man. I did a bit of testing to see if this hypothesis was true:
milia@Newton:~/Downloads/apljk/apljk-related-repos$ info man | wc -l
info: No menu item 'man' in node '(dir)Top'
676
milia@Newton:~/Downloads/apljk/apljk-related-repos$ man man | wc -l
475
So, since the `info man` and `man man` have different lines, they can't be the same. Thus my friends hypothesis was wrong. The error remains though :(
Friendly feature requests:
1. Could you please write an info for the info program so that the `info info` doen't return just an error message, but provides a full length description about how info works, with line count larger than `man info` ?
2. Could you please do a RCA as to why we get the error "info: No menu item 'man' in node '(dir)Top'" when we do `info man`? I believe this shouldn't be displayed.
System:
I run the above unix commands on a x86_64 system with the following OS:
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS
Release: 18.04
Codename: bionic
Apology:
If by any effect the `info info` should work and the issue is on my system, my deepest apologies.
Thank you very much for the consideration and your time.
Best regards,
milia#0919
--
Michail L. Liarmakopoulos, MSc