When reading a manpage for complex tools like rsync, or find, often there are options that imply several other options. Or like with wget the manpage will recommend a several options together for a certain situation. So consider this excerpt:

… Actually, to download a single page and all its requisites (even if they exist on separate websites), and make sure the lot displays properly locally, this author likes to use a few options in addition to -p:

wget -E -H -k -K -p http://<site>/<document>

At that point interested readers are essentially driven to do four separate searches on that manpage to chase down each of those options. So I hit: HOME / -E. Got lucky because the first match just happened to be the -E option and not chatter about “Content-Encoding”.

Then what? I forgot all options I need to search for and lost my starting place, so I had to browse/search back to where I was to learn that I next need to search for -H. Then I hit: HOME / -H. It brings me to an irrelevant match on “non-HSTS-compliant”. So I must hit / ENTER many times until I reach the right position. Searching for -k is tedious too. …And so on…

With rsync the -a: “archive mode is -rlptgoD (no -A,-X,-U,-N,-H)”. Rsync is not a disaster though as they took care to summarize all options with a one-liner in one place.

Anyway, unless I am missing a trick¹, it seems there must be a lot of time waste with users having to jump around using a dicey search mechanism prone to false positives.

¹ In the course of writing this rant, I discovered I could search the rsync man page by doing /-a\>, which at least skips past many false hits by specifying a word boundary. Still more tedious than it has to be though.