Coming from GNU land, you might have poor expectations of manuals.
GNU things like the GNU Core Utilities have taught you that manuals are largely recitations of a command's option listings, with nothing else to add except a boilerplate note that you really should be using a non‐standard GNU info system instead.
Vide the GNU ls manual for example.
In fact, that is exactly how the manuals for GNU Core Utilities are constructed: the --help strings are collected from the program source code and dumped, after some reformatting, into the manual with some boilerplate fore and aft.
You don't learn anything new from man ls beyond the text that is in ls --help.
On a BSD, reaching for the manual should be the first action if you want to look up something.
Contrast the NetBSD ls manual.
The BSD world has a long‐standing tradition, mostly upheld but of course with the occasional exception, of putting things into the manuals, and keeping the manuals up‐to‐date with what the programs do.
It also has a lot of extra things beyond just commands and C library functions. Some examples:
Where everything is in the filesystem.
The ASCII table.
How UTF-8 works
Generating morse code (or punched card or even paper tape codes).
Ringing people on the 'phone using your operating system, like you were that teenager out of War Games.
Telephone numbers are super secret, and for superusers only.
Let us hope that those AT&T Unix folk do not ever think of putting everyone's telephone numbers in some sort of big book. ☺
(Yes, /etc/phones is world‐readable out of the box on modern BSDs.
Given that on‐line copies of this very manual page are mostly what WWW search engines return when asked what a ‘DF02-AC’ is, really the BSDs could be doing better here.
I said that the manual was not perfect.)
The uuencode file format.
The uuencode and uudecode commands are still in the base operating system in the BSDs.
Even the kernel gets manual pages.
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Jonathan de Boyne Pollard.
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