what’s wrong with man pages?
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…
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?
They’re the best. I mean, just look at the alternative that Windows offers… oh wait there isn’t any.
Some man pages are just gigantic lists of unintuitive parameters in alphabetical order with no usage examples and even if you know how to search for text in a man page (forward slash then the text you want to search for) you’re just stabbing in the dark.
Others are excellent.
The problem with man pages is that you never know if you’re getting the former or the latter.
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
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
