Random-Man

Description

random-man is a tiny shell script that is useful for education of new (and old) users about the UNIX commands available to them through the shell. When executed, it chooses a random program in the user's PATH and displays the man page for it. It will silently ignore commands that do not have manual pages or other errors and will exit only when a man page can be generated.

Instead of displaying the manual page, you can instead ask for only the summary line (that is, the command chosen plus the one-line description provided at the top of the man page). Add a "-s" flag to do so.

You can also override the path searched by providing each segment of that path as an argument to random-man. This is handy for users that do a lot of sudo-ing that want to learn about commands they otherwise have overlooked.

Download & Install

You can download this release from SourceForge. Choose from tar-gz or RPM. You can also view the Project Page here.

Examples

random-man: Display a random man page from the user's PATH.
random-man -s: Display only the summary line from a command at random.
random-man -s /bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin: Show administrator commands

Serving Suggestions

I like to use random-man to display a random admin command at startup, so I have the following in my .bashrc:

echo 'Did you know about:' `random-man -s /bin/sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin` '?'

I am occasionally surprised by what is returned and the wealth of tools I didn't even know about!

Contact

Direct questions to Rich Harkins. This page and the package described are protected under the GPL. Special thanks to SourceForge for hosting this project.