Man Pages Revamped: tcpdump and dig Now Include Beginner-Friendly Examples

Man Pages Revamped: tcpdump and dig Now Include Beginner-Friendly Examples

In a move to make critical network diagnostic tools more accessible, the maintainers of tcpdump and dig have officially added beginner-focused example sections to their man pages. The update aims to help infrequent users and newcomers quickly get started with packet analysis and DNS lookup commands without wading through dense documentation.

The new examples cover the most basic use cases, such as capturing network traffic with tcpdump and querying DNS records with dig. According to the project’s documentation contributor, the goal was “to give the absolute most basic examples for people who use tcpdump or dig infrequently—or have never used them before—and don’t remember how it works.”

The contributor credited maintainers Denis Ovsienko, Guy Harris, and Ondřej Surý for their thorough reviews, calling the experience “motivating” and praising the process for ensuring near‑100% accuracy. One surprising discovery during the update was that using the -v flag with tcpdump -w out.pcap prints a live count of packets captured, a feature the contributor admitted they “never would have noticed on their own.”

Background

Manual pages, or man pages, have long been the primary documentation for Unix‑like systems, but they often suffer from outdated or overly technical content. Many users turn to blogs or Stack Overflow instead. The tcpdump and dig man pages, written in the roff language, are no exception—roff is notoriously difficult to edit and maintain.

To bypass the learning curve, the contributor wrote a custom markdown-to-roff converter, allowing them to draft examples in Markdown before converting them to the required format. While tools like pandoc exist, the output was deemed too different, motivating the creation of a tailored script. The new examples are now part of the official man pages for both tools.

What This Means

For network administrators, system engineers, and security analysts, the addition of clear, accurate examples lowers the barrier to using these essential commands. Infrequent users no longer need to memorize flags or search for external tutorials—they can simply type man tcpdump or man dig and see practical, tested commands.

The update also signals a broader trend: the open‑source community is recognizing that documentation can—and should—be as engaging and helpful as a well‑written blog post. As the contributor noted, “Maybe the documentation doesn’t have to be bad? Maybe it could be just as good as reading a really great blog post, but with the benefit of also being actually correct.”

With this release, the tcpdump and dig projects have set a new standard for man page quality. Users are encouraged to read the updated tcpdump man page or the dig man page to see the examples in action.