A large portion of them are just auto-generated from the `--help` output (and --help has always been fairly high quality for GNU tools). Perhaps with a few extra paragraphs sprinkled in.
I've found that GNU man pages are often an unhappy medium between the terseness of `--help` and the verbose explanations in the info manuals; and so the GNU man pages are almost never what I want. If I want to just quickly look something up, the man pages are too big and I should have used --help, and if I want to understand something they're too brief and I should have used info.
That said, the Bash man page is great (as is the info page). It's always amazed me that the Bash maintainer (Chet Ramey) goes through the trouble of maintaining two entirely separate documents with such detail and quality.
A large portion of them are just auto-generated from the `--help` output (and --help has always been fairly high quality for GNU tools). Perhaps with a few extra paragraphs sprinkled in.
I've found that GNU man pages are often an unhappy medium between the terseness of `--help` and the verbose explanations in the info manuals; and so the GNU man pages are almost never what I want. If I want to just quickly look something up, the man pages are too big and I should have used --help, and if I want to understand something they're too brief and I should have used info.
That said, the Bash man page is great (as is the info page). It's always amazed me that the Bash maintainer (Chet Ramey) goes through the trouble of maintaining two entirely separate documents with such detail and quality.