Broken Apple Man Page Links
Yesterday, I discovered that Apple had changed the URLs of all its online man pages. Without, I should add, creating redirects so old links would continue to work. This broke all the man page links I had here at ANIAT and undoubtedly broke links across the internet.
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Most of the URL is the same, but the “mac” part is gone, and the whole library has been moved to the “legacy” subdirectory, which is kind of ominous. I suppose there could be another copy of the library outside the “legacy” subdirectory, but I haven’t found it, and so far neither has Google.
Adding a redirect from the prior URL to the new one is old-hat basic stuff. I’d be shocked about this if I didn’t run into an issue earlier this year where I discovered that Apple News links don’t automatically redirect from the
http://version to thehttps://version, and simply display a 404 error page instead.
Apple has the same problem for regular documentation links.
Linking to Apple’s site in a blog post is uncomfortable. Most links will be broken or the content will be totally different in a year.
Update (2016-05-03): Jack Lawrence:
I’ve spoken with the team & the redirects were added last weekend. Please test & let me know if you’re still having issues.
I just tested a bunch of links from my old blog posts, and the redirects all worked.
