Man page as a curriculum vitae

16

Man page as a curriculum vitae ☶ design unix skiqqy.xyz
via deavmi 4 months ago | archive
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26

You can view this guy’s CV as a man page by running:

man <(curl -s https://skiqqy.xyz/skiqqy.1)

I think it’s pretty nifty.

5

phoebos 4 months ago | link

Roff is nice in that it’s so easily compiled to many formats - including HTML or PDF for CV submission.

June from causal.agency does something similar but writes her blog posts in mdoc(7), and her projects have README.7 rather than README.md.

jonahx 4 months ago | link

$ man <(curl -s https://skiqqy.xyz/skiqqy.1)
/dev/fd/63
/dev/fd/63
fgets: Illegal seek
Error reading man page /dev/fd/63
No manual entry for /dev/fd/63

1

deavmi 4 months ago | link

Man’s power is probably out, try again. ZA woes…

3

apg 4 months ago | link

I’ve been doing this for ages! apg.7

man <(curl http://apgwoz.com/apg.7)
1. 2
  phoebos 4 months ago | link
  You write markdown-style links in man? Why? man(7) has UR:
  
  .UR http://example.com/ link text .UE ,
  
  and mdoc(7) has Lk.
  1. 1
    
    apg 4 months ago | link
    
    TIL, I guess. :) I’ll have to update it when I get a chance! Thanks for the pointer!
2. 1
  
  deavmi edited 4 months ago | link
  
  This is awesome. Also, as for the latter part of your “Conforming to” - well done brother.
  
  Update:
  
  This kinda makes me want to go back to messing around with gopher. Reading text in my terminal is so pleasing honestly.
3

elobdog 4 months ago | link

And I mistrust anyone who wants me to download an untrusted internet thingy and hand it over to trustworthy “man”. Those who did it should check your systems for all kinds of evil! :-P
1. 2
  
  gerikson 4 months ago | link
  
  It’s been a while since man had a reported vulnerability
  
  https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-1999-1313
  1. 4
    
    dmbaturin 4 months ago | link
    
    But how long has it been since anyone made an earnest effort to find a vulnerability in man? :)
    
    I agree that it’s unlikely, but I think the philosophical point about curl’ing arbitrary data from the net and feeding it to random local programs isn’t a risk-free pastime.
  2. 1
    
    elobdog 4 months ago | link
    
    That is a good point, though I was specifically calling out the new-age habit of piping (or curl’ing) random internet blob to a local trusted blob, which, in my opinion is a minefield. It is the #1 “security anti-pattern”. :)
2. 1
  
  l0b0 4 months ago | link
  
  Yeah, as nifty as this is, passing random web pages to a Turing-complete processor seems like a Bad Idea™.
  1. 2
    
    doug-moen edited 4 months ago | link
    
    That’s why OpenBSD developed mandoc, a secure and non Turing complete man page formatter. If a man page attempts to do something unsafe, like run a shell command, then a security warning is printed instead. The man command is secure if you use an OS that is designed for security.
  2. 1
    
    LenFalken 4 months ago | link
    
    JS is a “Turing-complete processor”…
    1. 4
      
      l0b0 4 months ago | link
      
      It took many years for browsers to weed out attack vectors effectively. I doubt a thousandth of the same effort has gone into man.
2
safinaskar 4 months ago | link
Doesn’t work
```
d-user@comp:~$ curl -s https://skiqqy.xyz/skiqqy.1
^C
d-user@comp:~$
```
Hangs
1. 1
  
  deavmi 4 months ago | link
  
  curl -s https://skiqqy.xyz/skiqqy.1
  
  Wonder if skiqqy’s machine is down mmmmh
1

jwright 4 months ago | link

strange to see vim and minimal software advocacy on the same page
1. 3
  
  gerikson 4 months ago | link
  
  I literally cannot tell if you’re being facetious or not.
  1. 3
    
    gthm 4 months ago | link
    
    ed is the standard editor.
2. 1
  
  deavmi 4 months ago | link
  
  Out of genuine interest what do you use (I am not a vim user but aware of it)
1

kqr 4 months ago | link

It is nifty. Gathering from the comments here, people know more *roff (or mdoc? or man?) than I had expected. I’ve never written a man page but I’d like to learn it – does anyone have suggestions on good learning materials?

On a completely different note: this person appears to have four-ish years of professional experience (or even less?) yet rate themselves very high on a scale of 1–10. Are you supposed to do that?
1. 3
  
  gthm 4 months ago | link
  
  I had the same urge yesterday, so I got groff and spent a couple of hours wandering around websites, each of which explained maybe 5% of the trivial typesetting and program use I wanted to do. Then I typeset a page of a math paper of mine in groff + ms + eqn and got a PostScript file that looked exactly like what I’d get from Microsoft Word and its equation editor.
  
  The nerds are wrong about this one.
  1. 1
    
    phoebos 4 months ago | link
    
    Bear in mind that you got the same result from totally different programs: one is a massive executable, probably with various dependencies, maybe uses the cloud, etc; the other is a suite of small (neatroff + ms + eqn is less than 14k lines of C) tools. And they produce the same output.
2. 1
  
  phoebos 4 months ago | link
  
  roff is the language; man and mdoc are macro sets that make it easier and less verbose to do common things. The mdoc reference compiler, mandoc, is excellent; it can generate HTML.
  
  mdoc is now generally the preferred macro set for writing manpages, because it uses semantic markup - you can say “this is a variable” rather than “write this in italic” etc.
  
  There’s a good full guide to writing manpages in mdoc(7) here: https://manpages.bsd.lv/.
  Once you’ve read that, man 7 mdoc (or man 7 groff_mdoc) is the reference you need.
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  gerikson 4 months ago | link
  
  man 7 man is a good start!