- All right.
Let me show you pinfo.
Now, what is the thing?
The thing is that some commands like man ls,
you go all the way down,
by the way, uppercase D brings you all the way down,
there you will see the SEE ALSO.
And in this SEE ALSO,
you can see full documentation is on this website
and locally available via info.
Wow, that's a long command,
info '(core utils) ls invocation'.
Now, what is this info system?
This info system was created somewhere in the 1980s.
And it makes you think a little bit of a webpages.
It's showing you a hierarchy
that has child items and parent items,
and much more complicated stuff.
And honestly,
info is not the most user-friendly stuff that you can use.
And that is why, personally, I am never using it.
But as man pages are telling you about it,
at least you should have an impression of what is going on.
So I am going to change the command,
and I'm making it pinfo.
pinfo is a little bit more convenient
because pinfo will show you like a text based browser.
And in the text based browser, you see hyperlinks.
Do you see what's happening in the lines at the bottom?
I'm using my mouse key right now.
And by using the mouse key
I am capable of selecting additional options.
So this is really the manual
and I'm going to select which files are used.
While I do so, you should also have a look at the top line.
The top line, that's the line that is marked in blue,
where right now we can see file, coreutils.info.
Node, that's a current topic,
and the current topic is ls invocation.
Next, dir invocation, and Up, Directory listing.
Now I'm selecting this, which files are used.
And if you look at the top line right now,
you can see the Node is which files are used.
And Up, is ls invocation.
If you press U, for up, then you go up.
And you can do the same thing again.
So sorting up, there we go.
This is the help about sorting output.
And there you can see there's note on file stamps.
I press Enter, and suddenly I'm in the file stamps.
And, well, this is how you easily get lost
in the jungle of pinfo.
The nice thing about pinfo
is that frequently it has good documentation.
There is nothing wrong
with the quality of the documentation,
but what makes pinfo a little bit hard
is that it is like a web interface
that is captured in a text based utility.
So probably the best thing
when you see in man pages,
full documentation at some website or available locally,
well, I would advise you just go to the website.
The website contains the same information,
and is providing the information in a readable way.
You wanna check it out?
Let's go check it out.
I'm right clicking, and I'm using Copy Link,
and going to the graphical browser.
And then we are going to check it out in the browser.
So here we are in the browser.
And I am using Paste and Go, and what do we get?
Hey, doesn't this look familiar?
As you can see, this is what you see in pinfo as well.
Good old '90, '91 internet based text browsing
but probably you are more at ease in this interface
than in the text based interface.
Well, in the end, it's up to you, but this is how it works.