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[Edit: I believe the question alone is perfectly valid, since quick, communicable access to a manpage is certainly relevant to server administrators. But to prove I put some thought into the question, my original query is below. In case others want to know the answer to the question for other, less flakey reasons feel free to completely ignore anything I wrote beyond this bracketed portion]

Say I want to link to a common Linux command's manpage in a Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook, email, blog post, etc. I know that the definitive manpage is the one written by the package maintainer, but that will not necessarily be posted online in html format, on the same server from which you download their source code (as an srpm, tar.gz file, etc.)

The particular wording of the manpage is important, so another description of the same command on wikipedia or article/howto is not what I'm looking for.

One of the top search results is linux.die.net, but I'm not sure placement in search results should be the only criterion I should be using here. It might seem overly cautious or picky, but a link is an endorsement of sorts.

This might not be considered a valid question since the answer is a matter of opinion, so let me constrain the question to criteria that will limit the possible answers to a handful at most:

  • preferably from an open-source reputable distro/maintainer (ie not link-bait)
  • few or no ads
  • link that will work for at least a year
  • readable format, links to related commands, etc

Ok, this is starting to sound really stuffy and is long because I am procrastinating (asking a question before posting online something only tangentially related to my project), so I'm going to stop here!

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The trusted source is the version installed on the readers system. Man pages can be different on different platforms, and simply stating: Please read (e.g.) man 1 wc is the general accepted method. Also, this is totally off-topic on SF. Please read our faq. – SvenW Jan 15 at 18:15
I feared it might be off-topic, I apologize. It's just that server maintainers consult Linux manpages all the time, and might communicate with others about them, and if the exact wording is the focus of the communication, will want a 1) compact way of relaying that wording and 2) not ask the receiver to bring up a terminal but rather just click (you could quote an excerpt of the manpage but often server admins will believe something only when they get it from a trusted outside source) – Jessica Jan 15 at 18:28
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I always have at least one terminal window open, and I guess this is true for most admins. And just typing man whatever will give me the man page for the exact version and variant of the command installed on my system. Also, exact wording is seldom important. Lastly, If I wouldn't trust a quoted part of the man page, I wouldn't trust the rest of the post in question as well and likely not read it at all. – SvenW Jan 15 at 18:52
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This is a service recommendation question which is specifically excluded by our FAQ. However, I do want to draw your attention to our sister site Unix & Linux which is a better place for general Linux/Unix usage questions. – sysadmin1138♦ Jan 15 at 18:59
SvenW, You could be enjoying manpages in so many more places! Imagine you only have your iPhone with you and want to post on twitter that the wording of the '-c' option is so unbelievably confusing that if you could even fit the excerpt into your tweet people would be more likely to believe it was some kind of spelling correction error on the part of iOS than an actual sentence in a real manpage. Kind of a stretch, but still. – Jessica Jan 15 at 19:03
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closed as off topic by Ben Pilbrow, SvenW, sysadmin1138♦ Jan 15 at 18:59

Questions on Server Fault are expected to generally relate to servers, networking, or desktop infrastructure, within the scope defined in the faq.