Flashes of Panic

For Mac users: via TidBITS, a package called ManOpen, which lets you read unix manual pages in a regular Macintosh application (with helpful things like scrolling) rather than on the Terminal screen. It comes with a command line app called openman which lets you spawn a ManOpen window from the Terminal command line.

For the unix-averse (or uninitiated): man is short for “manual” and it’s the command for getting just that: a manual for a particular program. Of course, the abbreviation leads to all kinds of command-line fun, like the recursive man man, the frustrated (and frustrating) man bash, and the absolutely futile man woman:

$ man woman
No manual entry for woman
$

Now playing: Getting Away With It (All Messed Up) from Pleased to Meet You by James