I’ve got to confess, I have for years been guilty if not reading the documentation. I simply go with the flow and hope it works…
But not anymore! And why the change you may ask? We’ll, I’m reading the f…ing documentation on Rocky linux and I’m just blown away from the amount of great information!
If you’ve been guilty of not reading the documentation, let me me know what changed it for you
If you’re not reading the documentation, this is your time to confess!
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Lol reading the source has trained me to try reading the documentation.
If it’s good, it’ll save hours or crawling through code.
well I’d read the documentation if websearch wasn’t so shoddy that I could find it in the first place /s
Man pages tend to assume a lot and overload the user with information.
Forums are full of “duh, haven’t you read the man pages, idiot?” kinds of people.
Web searches are full of AI/garbage (same thing) articles that focus on distros/programs that are either horrendously inaccurate, out of date, or simply don’t exist anymore.
Therefore, I utilize the
tldrman pages, and use extremely specific terms for web searches.Oh thank hell it’s not just me. Every so often I retry the man command only to get frustrated having to flip through six walls of text via keyboard for something a 20 second Internet search would have easily refreshed my memory on.
Oh it is certainly not just you, I am sometimes confused reading them even for commands I have used for years and I know what flag I am looking for but don’t remember the exact syntax or something hah! I am glad they are there but they are definitely not a complete guide to any command, especially built-ins.
Interestingly, this is something AI has been very useful for to me, less searching because I can describe the outcome I want and it figures out what I am talking about generally.
FYI
Use / to search the man page, it’s basically less. Been doing that for years, as some man pages are the length of the great wall of China.
Bingo.
And even then it’s difficult to find shit, like for instance, finding the working directory for
crontabwhen run as root. This answer on Stack Overflow is the embodiment of my second example in the other comment. The answer goes into great detail, references the man pages, and still doesn’t answer the question in any reasonable capacity for a “standard user” like myself.
Man can be searched as well, if you use less or grep a lot the same keys work.
Use / to search
Yes, I am painfully aware. Unfortunately, this doesn’t actually help.
I had a boring manufacturing job with long gaps between batches of work, so I read every help file in Windows NT4.1. While reading them, I found a way around our IT limitations on which apps we could run, and learned how to write scripts. So I wrote a password protected launcher tool using a macro feature in a terminal emulator I had access to on my workstation, and then started reading the man pages in Unix sys-V.
What the … LOL
Gotta start somewhere 😅
“F* you, I won’t read what you tell me!”
- Rage Against The Manual
so rally round your PC… with a pocket KVM
I find that the docs usually consist of a quick start guide covering some ultra tight scenario that doesn’t apply to most people, and reference material that’s just some total brain dump of every possible command without any kind of context.
Oh it happens to the best of us. I was working on a simple cron the other day with the cron string that would insert the cron into my cron config something like ‘echo’ and the normal string you’d recognize, and ended with a ‘-’. I wasn’t paying attention and issued the command which did insert itself into the cron config, but in a manner in which I didn’t want. It replaced the whole cron file with that one string. #$@^$$ Luckily I have a cron to back up the crontabs.
Depends on what I am doing. Walky Talky? Toaster? Dish washer? … Who needs a manual for that?
FID detector? I need to know several things before turning it on. New Mainboard? Why is the WoL setting behind wake on PCIe?
Well, I’ve had a job where most coms were through a walky talky and somehow people didn’t understand they had to think - push - talk 😅
Funny how that’s the case for most people 🤣
RTFM. …
… The last thing you try.If documentation is written in a readable and confluent way, RTFM isn’t such a big deal. The issue comes with overly draconian and non-confluent documentation.
Looking at you, Nix documentation
Day 564: I have become lost in the forums amidst flake debate threads. Do not search for me, it is already too late.
I thought you wrote confluence and wanted to grab my pitchfork.
rivers
You’re absolutely right
There is a way with chmod in bash to change files and folders with files getting no execute bit and folder do (rwX instead of rwx). It’s in the man pages but good luck finding it via Google. Stackoverflow just suggests using find over and over again.
That did it for me.
In my experience, all the Linux documentation I have read has been written for peers of Linux developers, who are familiar with technical terminology and several concepts and steps are left out and implied rather than explained.
It’s a way for developers to ensure that Linux never receives adoption past other developers. Literary equivalent of pulling the ladder up.
who are familiar with technical terminology and several concepts and steps are left out and implied rather than explained.
Said it before and I’ll say it again: had to manually install some software to make Steam tinker launch work, and the instructions for installing it were to download and prepare the GitHub folder, then “do the usual and move the completed file to …”
Ive used git in the past and it still took me multiple minutes to figure out they meant the “make && build” command. Why was that so hard to fucking write??
Highly specialized people live in bubbles and assume that everyone else lives in their same bubble and so if someone else doesn’t understand, they aren’t worth communicating with.
XKCD 2501, basically.
Thank you for this. It’s beautiful.
I mean, it’s technical documentation. There’s a limit to how exciting it can be. lol.
Confluent?
Flowing/coming together.
I think what they are referring to are docs where pieces are explained individually, but not in a consistent or cohesive way, obfuscating use.
I mostly try to read the docs, but sadly good documentation is pretty rare.
I also don’t RTFM
I would say that I RTFM about 75% of the times (give or take). Though I only do it to see if I can find something other than what I intended to use the software or hardware for.
I volunteer as developer for a decade old open source project. A sizable amount of my contribution is just cooking up decent documentation or re-writting old doc from the original module authors written close to a decade ago because it failed me information wise when I needed it. Programmers as it turns out are very ‘eh, the code should explain itself to anyone with enough brains to look at it’ type of people so lost in the sauce of being hyperfluent tech nerds instantly understanding all variables, functions, parameters, and syntax at very first glance at source code, that they forgot the need for re-translation into regular human speak for people of varying intelligence/skill levels who can barely navigate the command line.
Programmers as it turns out are very ‘eh, the code should explain itself to anyone with enough brains to look at it’ type of people
I cannot say how much I hate this.
even worse for old code where proper variable naming and underscores were forbidden. Impossible to get into someone else’s head.
I worked next to a technical writer for Unix; the Unix. One of the things we were known for, actually, was the amazing documentation. This guy and both teams of writers (that many) maintained the doc as their entire job. It was written well, it was spell-checked, it was accurate, it was accessible. If you installed the machine, it was on http://localhost/doc or so.
Almost all tech writers were turfed after Y2K. They cost money and didn’t earn directly.
If you notice a lack of good docco like you notice a lack of mentoring in code dev (I see you, Systemd), then we know how we got to this stage.
If you become CEO, just keep that in mind.
As a technical writer, I always get a bit giddy when someone shows appreciation for good docs haha Thanks for sharing!
