What is the differences between "man" and "info" command

folak@lemmy.world to Linux@lemmy.ml – 52 points –

Hi,

I saw there https://askubuntu.com/questions/9325/what-is-the-difference-between-man-and-info-documentation that info is "better" than man because is outdated. Still right in 2023 ?

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Well.. I guess I have been living under a rock. Today is the first time to have heard of info. I have been using man for well over 2 decades now.

Surprising you haven't come across a man page that basically says "We couldn't be bothered putting everything in here, check out the info page on it instead."

I feel like I find myself on one of those every 6 months or so.

That's funny, I had the opposite experience. When I found out that info was the GNU projects recommended way of documentation, I was all on board. Then I tried using it, and it couldn't find most CLI software I used. So I downloaded the texinfo archives... and that still lacked probably 50% of the commands I tried to look up.

Then I searched up how to get info pages for this or that tool, and someone on StackOverflow had said that it was woefully incomplete and outdated at this point.

I think I'll give it another try and report back