Of course emacs is the biggest
this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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OK a lot of them I can get behind, but wtf is the deal with tar at 262 pages or so.
Probably need to list all possible strings of options that nobody understands.
tar xpourhtjfvzju
Keep in mind that the tar "manual" does not actually call itself a "manual": it refers to itself as a "book". It has 20 pages of preamble (5 title pages, discussions of the authors, descriptions of the intended audience, etc.) It has another 20 pages elaborating on important structs in the tar source code. The licence takes up another 10 pages. The index at the end is 25 pages long.
The manual for tar on my machine is 1025 lines long whereas bash's manual has 4728. gawk's manual is likewise light at 1723. (Measured with screen width of 120 chars)
It looks like some of the manuals on that site are super in-depth versions - practically books - rather than PDF versions of the man versions.
For example, tar's has several pages dedicated to the GNU Free Documentation License which is very much not part of the command line version. Add a few more sections like that and things soon add up.
That's because the link is measuring the length of the info docs, not the man pages.
A lot of info manuals are really extensive. I read a good chunk of the info manual for sed a while back and it is very thorough. It's always annoying though when I go to check man for something quick and all you can get are texinfo pages. Luckily that isn't too common anymore. I think GNU caught on that it was annoying.
