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I remember when I was a kid, people asking a teacher how to spell a word, and the answer was generally "look it up in a dictionary"… which you can only do if you already have shortlist of possible spellings.

*nix man pages are the same: if you already know which tool can solve your problem, they're easy to use. But you have to already have a shortlist of tools that can solve your problem, before you even know which man pages to read.



That’s what GNU info is for, of course.


man -k (or apropos)


`apropos` would itself be an example of a *nix tool that I didn't know existed and therefore wouldn't have known to find out more about.




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