340
Man pages bad
(sh.itjust.works)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
340 points (83.1% liked)
linuxmemes
21281 readers
66 users here now
Hint: :q!
Sister communities:
- LemmyMemes: Memes
- LemmyShitpost: Anything and everything goes.
- RISA: Star Trek memes and shitposts
Community rules (click to expand)
1. Follow the site-wide rules
- Instance-wide TOS: https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
- Lemmy code of conduct: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/code_of_conduct.html
2. Be civil
- Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
- Do not harrass or attack members of the community for any reason.
- Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
- Bigotry will not be tolerated.
- These rules are somewhat loosened when the subject is a public figure. Still, do not attack their person or incite harrassment.
3. Post Linux-related content
- Including Unix and BSD.
- Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of
sudoin Windows. - No porn. Even if you watch it on a Linux machine.
4. No recent reposts
- Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.
Please report posts and comments that break these rules!
Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't fork-bomb your computer.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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.
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.
I bet you could describe a problem, tell them to not run that command, and then put the command there to copy and paste and people would still fuck up their systems.