TIL: Don't actually display the man pages

I have installed Plan 9 on my Raspberry Pi. I am excited to start using it. I can't use Plan 9 yet because I need a new keyboard and mouse to use with my Pi. So, this evening I decided to peruse the online Plan 9 manual pages. I am excited and have been eagerly trying a few commands on my Mac to see what commands are also on my Mac.

I learned about bc for arithmetic and bc -l that imports the math library for bc. This let me do logarithms in bc (a strange way to test a command I admit).

Anyway... to the point of this post: manual pages.

I decided to type "man man" to read the manual for manual pages. Part of my brain knows I want to peruse the system call references. But for now, I wanted to point out a fun message I saw in the man man page:

-d Don't actually display the man pages, but do print gobs of debugging information.

I found it funny that the phrase "gobs of debugging information" appears in a manual page. I'd love to see someone make a site with amusing flags and phrases present in default os man pages. On an entirely separate topic, I'd like to know what the shortest IETF RFC is. Does anyone know? This question came to mind earlier today.

Tagged in linux-manuals, linux, debugging.