Man Page
Man Page
[A terminal screen; the background is black and the text is white.]
Actual UNIX manpages exist on some systems which are written in a similar, nonsensical style to these.
Manual pages distributed for the <n>fun sections describe similarly humorous "commands" with unusual options.
On some systems, these manual pages are available in funny-manpages or asr-manpages packages.

This comic shows a Unix manual page, i.e. a man page (hence the title), for a fictional program called " blerp ". Unix man pages are meant to provide a brief reference on the usage of a command, not extended explanations with tutorials as may be found in many hardcopy product manuals. Unfortunately, some Unix commands tend to be very bloated and include lots of optional behavior that is often irrelevant to the original intent of the command and can be done much more easily using shell features like piping and redirection, and thus the manpage grows to explain all of the features. This example exaggerates the obscurity and terseness found in many man pages, making fun of the typical style of the genre.
It follows the prescribed format for a man page, with the following sections:
For comic effect, most of this particular man page is not meaningful, and sometimes doesn't obey the expected syntax.
The Synopsis section is supposed to be in a regex -like language called Wirth Syntax Notation , with structures like
But the two Synopsis lines given do not have valid Wirth syntax; they randomly mix objects and syntactic characters, and the brackets and braces are not properly nested or paired.
The Description section provides an unhelpful summary that could apply to almost any Unix command. Processing input files (or output of other commands in a pipeline) is a generic function for Unix shell tools, as is specifying their behaviour with command line arguments, environment variables and flags. The text leaves to the reader's imagination what the program actually does , and what behavior the various options modify, which gives maximum scope for humorous possibilities.
The options are in conventional alphabetical order, except that lower case is placed before upper case, and an em-dash is inserted between b and c.
Command-line options , also known as flags, are typed after the program's name to change how the program runs. For example, a user of blerp might type:
blerp -a -d -t -p "AVIGNON"
According to the man page, this would run blerp in attack mode, piping its output to DEBUG.EXE, with tumble dry, and the true Pope set to "AVIGNON". In most cases, any number of flags can be used in any order, and flags can be followed by argument (such as "AVIGNON" in this example).
For a walkthrough of all possible flags see the table of flags below.
Below the flags there is a see also list with other ludicrous program names (blirb, blarb and blorp ), each followed by a number in parentheses. This is a common way to refer to a command in Unix environments, where the number denotes the documentation section the program is found in. This serves to disambiguate man pages with the same name, in this instance those for the blerp command (section 1, "General commands") and the blerp() C library function (section 3, "C library functions").
It is unknown which section the man page in this comic resides in. It looks like it could be in section 1, "General commands", which would make it self-referential. Section numbers only go up to 8, so blarb(51) is not a valid section number. The last blorp(501)(c)(3) is not a valid section number either, it is however a slightly covert reference to 501(c)(3) which is an organization that is tax-exempt .
Then follows a bug report site. www.inaturalist.org is a site working to extend biological research, and the exact address given, http://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/47744-Hemiptera , points to the same page as http://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/Hemiptera . Hemiptera is the order classifying true bugs , making it a good place to report any biological bugs discovered while running a program (Like the bees found without using -b.) Insects got into some early computers, causing them to malfunction, and hence computer malfunctions are often called "bugs".
Finally there is a " copyright " line which references several variously open-source content licenses, which is a recurring theme on xkcd (see 225: Open Source ). For instance, GPL references GNU General Public License and the (2) and (3+) refers to GPL 2 and GPL 3 or higher . CC refers to creative commons where BY is the type of license , 5.0 refers to the attribution and RV 41.0 refers to revision 41.0. However there were no higher attribution than 4.0 at the time of this comic's release. xkcd is released under CC BY-NC 2.5 as can be seen at the bottom of the xkcd homepage. A few comics have been released under the CC-BY-SA license or 3.0 . BSD refers to BSD licenses , another recurring theme in xkcd. "Like Gecko" is a reference to a web browser user-agent string; modern user-agent strings include a lot of text designed to allow browsers to masquerade as different browsers/renderers, and "(like Gecko)" is the standard text for a browser that wants to be treated as if it were Gecko while admitting, if you look closely, that it isn't really Gecko. This copyright line, which includes a lot of mashed-together text that might appear to match any of several different licenses, resembles a user agent string.
"Or best offer" is usually seen on a notice of a private sale, where it proclaims the intent to be flexible on asking price in the hope of expediting the sale, with a suggestion that the seller will sell to the highest bidder even if the offer is nowhere near the asking price. In the context of the comic, it suggest that the rights for the program are available for purchase by anyone who makes the "best" offer. Since the other licenses listed would allow free usage without incurring any royalty charge, it would be pointless to buy the rights to this program. It is possible to revoke the other licenses though. Perhaps the program's creator is suggesting the rights could be given to someone making him a different sort of offer, perhaps romantic or sexual?
In the title text there is a list with even more info, again with silly names like blarbl and birb . Again there are section numbers. While writing about birb, and without bothering to close the brackets around (3), the writer breaks off to laugh at the reader, telling them that he is kidding and suggesting that they just Google it like a normal person . The implication is that anyone trying to pick through a man page to find out what a program does is going the long way round, when it's much simpler to get Google to tell you.
Man pages were part of the subject of 293: RTFM , 912: Manual Override and 1343: Manuals and were mentioned in 434: xkcd Goes to the Airport and 456: Cautionary .
[A terminal screen; the background is black and the text is white.]
Actual UNIX manpages exist on some systems which are written in a similar, nonsensical style to these.
Manual pages distributed for the <n>fun sections describe similarly humorous "commands" with unusual options.
On some systems, these manual pages are available in funny-manpages or asr-manpages packages.
