what's wrong with man pages?
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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You need to read them apparently? I don't know, this is weird
Yeah, many people don't want to read and understand, just copy and paste.
I saw that in a lot of people I worked with on projects, they just look for something to copy and paste from the Internet without even trying to understand what it does. Just looking for some command without even paying attention to the text around it.
I remember one girl once that I gave her the link to the documentation explaining step by step what she needed to do, a link I had to find myself and pass it to her, of course, even when it was her task. Those steps included some alternatives like "if you are in this situation, run this command, but if you are in this other situation, run this other command" but she ignored all the instructions on that page and started copying and pasting every command that was found there. When I asked her what she was doing and why she was running every command there without reading the explanations around them, she said she thought she just had to run all the commands on that page.
The amount of times someone has asked me why something doesn't work, and I've silently pointed to the sentence or paragraph next to the code snippet they've copied...
Oh, yeah. I had this situation so many times in this same project. Even pointing them to the documentation and telling them to read it because the explanation was there didn't even work because they just wanted immediate answers. Sometimes I even had to join them on a call and tell them to stop, open the link on a screenshare and read it out loud to me to make sure they were actually reading it and not just telling me they read it.
It felt like teaching to read to first-grade schoolers.
not reading that essay (/s)
It's strange. The man pages contain everything you need to know and even examples ready to use. But people would rather try and fail several times. I wonder what inner motivation makes someone have this kind of process. Is there a reward when you manage to make it work through erring? Psychologists, do you know?
I think it's that the mental effort required to read the documentation, understanding how a tool works and producing an idea in your mind of how to achieve your purpose with the learning you just got of how that tool works is usually bigger.
Even if it takes more time, the mental effort of copying and pasting examples from Google until you find the one that works is way lower.
And that reminds me of an anecdote with one of the products our customers usually use. There was a problem which was kind of common and it had a discussion thread in the forum on the vendor's website where somebody suggested that the solution to the problem was rm -rf /var/lib/rpm.
Needless to say, we had a customer who ran that command because they had read on the Internet that it was the solution to their problem without understanding what that command was going to do. And of course they ruined that server which needed to be fully reinstalled.
Until I notified the vendor to delete that malicious advice from their forum, that answer lasted there for years and who knows how many people ran the same malicious command without trying to understand first the disaster they were going to cause.
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I'm starting to see this a lot. Some man-pages are very verbose and one might not have the time, but for the most part, opening a man page and lessing through it doesn't take too long, and it's usually up-to-date
They're the best. I mean, just look at the alternative that Windows offers... oh wait there isn't any.
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Man pages are great to have, all documentation easily accessible, mostly complete and directly available in your terminal.
Compare this to the shitshow that is git --help in windows opening a stupid browser. Somebody should be defenestrated for that decission.
I'm so fucking sick of every Linux meme being negative... Like are we supporting the community or actively trying to sabotage it?
Fuxk all these memes
Linux makes the word turn
Learn it and support it
This all started as irony, but it has gone too far
Regroup and get creative you sad intelligent fucks
How can you feel good about yourself if you aren't shaming people with less technical capabilities? Next you'll say something crazy like believing in yourself. Nonsense, crazy person. Get out of here.
The internet is full of bad advice.
Man pages are never wrong.
At least man pages are better than ChatGPT or other generative LLM that can hallucinate
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Actually man page good
Man pages save me an online search multiple times per week. Not sure that you're no about
It's a /s meme.
Am I the only one using tldr?
Well today my life just got easier. Thank you for the recommendation!
Tldr is awesome.
Wrong meme. The dark place is systemd.
I get confused every time I install a distro and man isn't installed by default. I guess I get the bare minimum philosophy, but it throws me off every time. First thing I install is vim, man, git, and probably a couple other things I can't remember right now.
I do like a decent man page that has examples for us dummies and I have found that they have improved a lot over the years.
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"tldr pages. Simplified and community-driven man pages. The tldr pages are a community effort to simplify the beloved man pages with practical examples."
Anyone who thinks this is just incapable of navigating them.
You have to admit though, they are a blast of the 1980s to the face for those who are younger and not used to it. It might be intimidating.
It's a /s meme, I thought it was obvious.
I think you accidently made a meme that is just too close to the truth to be seen as sarcastic
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Was this bullshit meme created by AI?
man "app" | grep "search keyword"
A lot of people in here need tldr before getting comfortable with man it seems
RTFM amaright guys?
I don't get what's so wrong with man. If the creator neglected to add a -h option, then there's at least a chance somebody made a man page.
If you're electing to use linux, you got time to burn. Spend a little time getting comfy with manpages. Little things like that really add up to being effective.
Laughs in RHCSA exam.
Yhea, you really learn to dig through the man pages and, if you didn't already know, learn that they are quite helpful.
Reading man pages is a skill of it''s own and the quality of man pages vary. However the ways of figuring out how to do something. 'Command -h' or 'command --help' 'man command' Search online for 'command examples'.
Tldr ftw
Manpages are good reference documentation when you already know which tool to use and how to use it and just need to tweak something. They can often be overwhelming otherwise. Just look at the number of flags on any git command, for example.
You've nailed this here, yet get downvotes. The amount of times I've gone to a man page and my eyes glaze over. Really handy to learn new flags or if you forget, but as an introductory material. They don't work for everyone. People learn in different ways, sometimes by doing and my brain isn't wired this way.
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