You get to learn the notation conventions with <> and [] fairly early on. Maybe a very new user would make that mistake. If he doesn’t get it fairly quick, maybe computers aren’t for him.
Nah m8, I’m generally on board with asking people to read the manual, but these unexplained conventions are nonsense. Pages really should be explicit about notation being added to commands that aren’t actually a part of them
Sure, but that is very far from obvious, and very few people who don’t already have an understanding of this stuff are going to know to look there. When I search for how to do something on the internet I mostly find 2 kinds of sources: stuff that’s way dumbed down (and usually out of date/incorrect) and stuff full of unexplained notation/abbreviations/arbitrary conventions without any links to resources that explain them.
I guess my issue with the man pages is mostly that they just don’t try to be approachable to the not-so-tech-litterate folk who might be interested in Linux if we had resources that didn’t assume all this foreknowledge.
BS. I’ve been using linux for over 20 years and I still don’t know what those mean. I can only guess from context. It’s a stupid convention to just use symbols like that and never explain it.
Following the openbsd example from the original comment I replied to, it has absolutely nothing to say about what brackets mean, so this advice would not be helpful for an openbsd system: https://man.openbsd.org/man
On my personal linux system (arch derivative, by the way), it at least mentions brackets meaning optional, but only in the context of arguments:
[-abc] any or all arguments within [ ] are optional.
I think this would trip up some new users. The destination, with or without the username to connect as, may not seem like an “argument” to a new user since it doesn’t have a dash before it like the example does
You get to learn the notation conventions with <> and [] fairly early on. Maybe a very new user would make that mistake. If he doesn’t get it fairly quick, maybe computers aren’t for him.
Nah m8, I’m generally on board with asking people to read the manual, but these unexplained conventions are nonsense. Pages really should be explicit about notation being added to commands that aren’t actually a part of them
They’re explained right at the beginning of the manpage.
The man manpage. I’m sure it was the first one you read? Because you wanted to know how man worked?
Sure, but that is very far from obvious, and very few people who don’t already have an understanding of this stuff are going to know to look there. When I search for how to do something on the internet I mostly find 2 kinds of sources: stuff that’s way dumbed down (and usually out of date/incorrect) and stuff full of unexplained notation/abbreviations/arbitrary conventions without any links to resources that explain them.
I guess my issue with the man pages is mostly that they just don’t try to be approachable to the not-so-tech-litterate folk who might be interested in Linux if we had resources that didn’t assume all this foreknowledge.
This mentality suuucckkss
hard agree
BS. I’ve been using linux for over 20 years and I still don’t know what those mean. I can only guess from context. It’s a stupid convention to just use symbols like that and never explain it.
Read the man manpage and all will be revealed.
Following the openbsd example from the original comment I replied to, it has absolutely nothing to say about what brackets mean, so this advice would not be helpful for an openbsd system: https://man.openbsd.org/man
On my personal linux system (arch derivative, by the way), it at least mentions brackets meaning optional, but only in the context of arguments:
I think this would trip up some new users. The destination, with or without the username to connect as, may not seem like an “argument” to a new user since it doesn’t have a dash before it like the example does