I agree and wish distro maintainers could make some changes. I would love to use manual pages, but instead I search the Internet first. If every manual had a section with most-common examples, it would help immensely. You could just type 'manexamples tar' and it would print out
tar cvf somedir filename.tar
create an archive from somedir and store it in filename.tar
tar xvpf filename.tar
extract the contents of filename.tar and scatter them around your home directory
Instead of getting examples that I might use, when I visit a man page, I get a wall of text 926 lines long, describing every possible option, including GNU option styles, or some truncated mess telling me to read the info pages.
Of course, it's appropriate that all this information is included somewhere in the manual. I just think the common use cases should be first. Does anyone need a man page for 'ls' that starts off describing how to list inode numbers and SELinux labels?
It's sort of embarrassing how much less efficient man pages are than a Google search to a SO question.
The justification I usually hear is that SO is for learning to solve one case, while man pages are for learning how the tool works. There's some merit to that, but if a tool has some hidden gotcha or unusual use, SO tends to make that much clearer than the actual documentation.
I suppose comprehensiveness was a higher priority when there wasn't an online discussion of every imaginable case, but it still feels like a lot could be done to convey the same amount of information more gracefully.
