Dumb Question: What does "-Fazy" do in "inxi -Fazy" (Man pages unclear)

Hello,

Okay, so here’s one you can all definitely make fun of me for. I’m trying to figure out what all the option flags do in the inxi -Fazy command.

-F is full (give all the info).
-z anonymizes the output so it’s suitable for public sharing (no MAC addresses, etc.)
-y with no argument sets output to 80 columns

But, I can’t find any info on a. What does it do?

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-a outputs substantially more information.

I think its “Admin Extra Data Options”

From the man file. inxi [-x|-xx|-xxx|-a]

-a being the maximum verbosity.

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try

inxi -Full -v8 
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ADMIN EXTRA DATA OPTIONS
       These options are triggered with --admin or -a. Admin options  are  ad‐
       vanced  output  options, and are more technical, and mostly of interest
       to system administrators or other machine admins.

       The --admin option sets -xxx, and only has to be used  once.   It  will
       trigger the following features:

Thanks, everybody.

Not sure why I couldn’t use the “Find” command to find the reference to -a in the man pages…

When browsing man pages press / and type your query and it will highlight all applicable text. Press N to cycle through them.

It’s all in man man my man, press h when browsing a man page for the manual of commands, man.

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:rofl:

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Now there’s a good question to ask when someone takes the mick out of some Ubuntu user for copy/pasting commands.

Wow. This is a huge bug in Linux - surely ‘inxi -h’ should bring up a simple help compared to the manual :rofl:

Saying it’s simple elevates me to the level of pure genius FTW.

So I’d say ‘a’ does combat some tidying of the output…
Look at the info section of inxi -F against inxi -Fa

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You asked for it: Manual pages for man-pages.

Relevant news: Manual pages indexing service

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How dare you, sir.

How dare you.

Interrupting the hurricane of puns with actual extremely useful and timely information that has changed how I search for Linux help.

(Seriously, this is great. Thanks! :slight_smile: )

I know, I know. I wanted to think of a pun. I really, really did. But this was just so wonderful and timely I had to just leave it here.

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4 posts were split to a new topic: Off topic stuff

We should Recommend The Fine Manpages more often :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

but man inxi is 1968 lines, so it may be better to start with something shorter

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/nodejs-tldr-git/

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tldr is i the official repos for the python one at least…

There are a few versions of this package, including one by our own @Yochanan

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/tldr++

:rofl:

❯ tldr inxi

  inxi

  Print a summary of system information and resources for debugging purposes.

  - Print a short summary of CPU, memory, hard drive and kernel information:
    inxi

  - Print a full description of CPU, memory, disk, network and process information:
    inxi -Fz

  - Print information about the distribution's repository:
    inxi -r

It’s a tiny bit too short!!!

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WOOAH, DUUUUDE!!!

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The man page doesn’t cover combinations of options like -Fazy, but if options start with -, not --, they are a collection of single character options, not long options, like --admin. -Fazy is -F -a -z -y. -admin would be -a -d -m -i -n, whereas --admin is -a.

Note that recently the help menu was reorganized to move all the extra data options into their own section, like on the man page, so in the help menu it’s now more clear that -a goes along with the other extra data options -x -xx and -xxx.

-v8 is everything about the system. -v7 is almost everything. -F is all upper case options except the very verbose -J and -L, plus -s. -F -v8 is silly because -v7 and -v8 are both almost everything, and certainly more than -F. -F is very roughly comparable to -v5, but I don’t think it’s exactly the same, not sure, but -F is about -v5, -b is -v2, and inxi alone is -v0

-F uses a special form of -R and -E, which means if no data is found, no no data found message appears, to avoid clutter.

-a is --admin which also triggers -xxx automatically. -z triggers the main filters, including the --no-host one. It does not trigger the secondary filters, like for disk labels and uuids, those you have to trigger explicitly. -a -xxx has no meaning since it’s redundant, -a covers it.

You don’t have to read the entire man page, you just scroll down until you get to -F/-full, but ‘full’ is actually not correct, -v8 is full, but that’s far too verbose for normal use. In the old days, -F was actually full, all the lines, but more lines were added that were too complicated, so -F is the main useful options, like -b is the main useful minimalist output, and inxi alone is the absolute minimum output to cover a system. I almost never use inxi alone because I don’t find it very useful.

-a in the man is covered extensively because --admin data is by definition complicated and not necessarily user friendly, so the man page does the best it can to explain what is happening on the lines where it changes output.

man inxi

Scroll with mouse

-F, --full
              Show Full output for inxi. Includes all Upper Case line letters (except -J and -W) plus --swap, -s and -n. Does not  show  extra  verbose  options such as -d -f -i -J -l -m -o -p -r -t -u -x unless you use those arguments in the command, e.g.: inxi -Frmxx

-a 

-z, --filter
              Adds security filters for IP addresses, serial numbers, MAC, location (-w), and user home directory name. Removes Host:.  On by  default  for  IRC clients.

-y, --width [integer]
              This is an absolute width override which sets the output line width max.  Overrides COLS_MAX_IRC / COLS_MAX_CONSOLE globals, or the actual  widths of the terminal. 80 is the minimum width supported.  -1 removes width limits. 1 switches to a single indented key/value pair per line, and removes all long line wrapping (similar to dmidecode output).
If no integer value is given, sets width to default of 80.
Examples: inxi -Fxx -y 130 or inxi -Fxxy or inxi -bay1

The -a is not really clear, but there is mention of it at the bottom of manual in the ADMIN EXTRA DATA OPTIONS