Stupid man pages

[Charles Hedrick]

I like the man pages to show some humor, and I oppose the concept that
commercializing Unix means removing any signs of life.  However I do
not appreciate humor when it takes the place of useful information.  I
suppose whoever wrote the reboot man page figured there was no
situation where -n was useful, so he made it into a joke:

>     -n   Avoid the sync(1).  It can be used if  a  disk  or  the
>          processor is on fire.

However there's a very real need for -n.  It might be sensible to
mention it in the man page.  If fsck finds a problem on root (or /usr
for SunOS), it is necessary to reboot the system without doing a sync.
If you did the sync, you might undo the repair done by fsck.  Thus
/etc/rc (rc.boot for SunOS) uses reboot -n in that situation.

Another similar situation is /usr/ucb/whoami's infamous error message
"Intruder alert".  I'm sure someone thought this was very cute, but
now and then misconfigured systems do trigger this error, and it would
be really friendly if whoami said something to help lead one in the
direction of finding the problem.  In fact "Intruder alert" means that
whoami was unable to find your uid in /etc/passwd (or the YP system
for SunOS).  Typically it means /etc/passwd is missing or protected
wrong, or that there is some problem with YP.