I was taken aback by one commenter whose command he wished he'd known for years was man, newly discovered by him. "All those years of googling, wasted."
What happened that it's possible for someone to not know that it exists?
Google is what happened. Not to date myself, but when I was first learning (BSDi) UNIX Google didn't exist. The first thing the sys-admin who helped me said was, "type 'man'."
These days most people just know that if they have an unanswered question, ask the Google.
> The first thing the sys-admin who helped me said was, "type 'man'."
And that also happened. It used to be virtually impossible to jump in alone, because someone had to create an account for you. It's now possible to start in Unix with no one's help. As long as you can figure out how to burn an iso to CD, you're in. The installation gives you an account, with sudo.
After you install CrunchBang, it pops up a terminal the first time you log in, and allows you to make additional choices that weren't made during install.
I think all distros should pop up a terminal upon first boot and direct you to read "man man."
You can learn a lot by searching the web, so many folks don't learn something new by reading the first chapter of any intro to Unix (or the shell) book anymore. It's still surprising though.
If you search for help with command line utils you are almost guaranteed to get some results that are man pages online, so the person who said that probably has read man pages without realizing it, and without the convenience of the man program.
What happened that it's possible for someone to not know that it exists?