Yeah, but where is the manual to read the fucking manual ?
Einstein reportedly said “Never memorize something you can look up in a book”. When asked the speed of sound he said , “I do not know but that number is commonly found in textbooks”.
I am not going to spend my life reading manuals. Reading my furnace manual years before a problem arises is unlikely to help me.
However, I completely agree that RTFM is a great thing to do with confronted with a gap in knowledge or problem to be solved. Not the whole manual probably, just the relevant parts.
I think it is much more important to store ideas in your head than information. That said, those ideas do not come from nothing.
I might not read the man pages of every command on a Linux system. At least, not all of them. But I should know high-level what commands are available and what they generally do. That allows me to think of them when they would be useful. But I probably have no idea what the proper syntax is for any of them when I go to use them.
And “the manual” is not always the best place to get ideas, even if it is the authoritative source for specific knowledge.
Time spent reading the manual is time not spent doing something else. Spend your time learning. Spend most of it learning what is possible. In my view, that is the best strategy.
Yeah very true. I was floundering with an issue recently. I couldn’t find any help until I added “docs” to my search. RTFM.
Does someone have the tldr?
/s
RTFM
Man pages in Linux are commonly meant for people already familiar with command structures, specific terms etc.
They are often borderline useless for an inexperienced user.
At work people think I’m some kind of wizard with git.
I tell them I’ve been using it every day for 15 years and I read the freely available book on the website, link them to it, and mention the first 3 chapters probably covers 90% of their normal usage so they should just read that.
They won’t do it. I don’t get it. Something about written words is scary to them.
Same here. I obviously don’t remember everything because I rarely if ever have to use them, but at least when the time finally comes that I need “git bisect”, I’ll know that “git bisect” exists and I’ll be able to go straight to the manual page that documents it.
No one expects anyone to read the manual and remember it all… But you will naturally remember the big lines and be able to refer to the right place when you need something.
The latest manuals I’ve read were from shitty Chinese manufacturers who didn’t even proofread what they wrote. They were asked to put foreign letters on a page and that’s what they did.
This is the next level of learning. Not only do you read how it is, you have to deduct, to assess and explore. Writing your own documentation is the best way to learn after all.
You can even learn a new language if you first read the version in a language you know and then do a language you don’t know yet.
For those who want to give it a go:
#!/bin/bash set -euo pipefail while read -rd ":" path do for bin in "$path"/* do # don't error out if there's no manpage set +e man "$(basename "$bin")" set -e done done < <(printf '%s%s' "$PATH" ":")when you get sick of it, hit
^Z(ctrl-z) and gokill %1. Then you get to start all over from the start next time!Bonus points for starting a tracker so you can count how long it takes to go from “eugh, what’s with that overwrought and excessively defensive bash script” to “fuck, now I’m doing it too”
I am not much of a bash guy so it took me a moment to understand what this was doing.
Too bad I have to read so many man pages before I get to bash or sh.
Unfortunately, the manual on goods these days is roughly the size of a post-it note. And even if they have proper ones, none of them have the full technical readouts, blueprints and repair guides that they used to back in the day.
I mean sure. This usually works okay. But some manuals are terrible. Specially those written by Google and Microsoft. Well mostly Microsoft. Google was probably good, I was just major verions behind.
Many man pages are also terrible
IME I’ll rather find some openapi docs for Google than their actual product docs. As in, I’ll start out trying to read their kubernetes docs, then shortly after it’s “fuck it, I’m going to docs.rs/k8s-openapi”.
My actual worst case are Elastic’s docs, though. Somehow they have plenty of stuff in there, just never the stuff I’m trying to figure out.
Google docs are written like they assume you already know the docs. 🙃
The only google docs I’ve used are for Google Analytics and they are TERRIBLE
Because their programmers are too busy to RTFM themselves to properly write a decent FM.
Yes, I of course read the docs. Yes, I didn’t fuck it up first and then went back to do double work because I was being lazy and wanted the quick dopamine hit of seeing something on the screen. That wouldn’t be me!
Not to take away how important reading these things are but I hate how people with a functional memory have no idea what life is like for people with poor memory. I would forget everything I read the minute button mashed the keyboard to quit the manual. It’s like when trying to imagine what is like living as one of those people without an inner voice. It’s such a foreign idea that its a shock when you realize some people don’t have one
Bro’s not saying you have to memorize the manual, just like … read it. Even a bit of familiarity goes a long way.
If you have literally no memory then command line is 100% unusable but otherwise every little bit helps.
No memory is me being hyperbolic but it’s severely limited. So I feel like reading a manual line by line means I get much less out of it but it’s a large amount of time invested. So I have to factor in that my retention vs time on task is pretty skewed. It’s frustrating. I need to do something a few times to learn. Learning by reading is not great for me. But tech is a very document heavy industry
So: read the man page, find the switches and options you need and hand write that bitch on a notepad, close the man page and execute the command. It’s tedious but it will help your not-great memory work a lot better.
Thank you for the advice. I’ll try that
Or easier, just fire up multiple tty’s. The poor person’s tabs.
What does tty mean in this context?
In this context it is multiple command line instances, like multiple terminals.
Most people don’t memorize things just by reading them. If you chose to construct some simple exercises/examples for yourself to learn by doing, this is very normal and in fact a good idea!
Thanks I’ll give that a try.
I don’t know if you mean you don’t remember the gist even, but it’s more about learning about what’s possible with what so you can look up specifics when you need them than remembering the contents wholesale
This is great perspective and advice. It’s how I learn too. I always felt like a poor performer because in my life I haven’t been able to recall specifics after learning something when I compared to others. I’ve got a complex. But general what you describe is how I recall. Almost in chunks but not specifics.
This is exactly it. Do I have to read a reference for regex every damn time? Yes. But I also have an idea of what it can do; and knowing that, I have a vague idea when a problem presents itself that I could use regex to solve it.
Edit: Hello Zalgo my old friend.
This goes against what we know about good design. Where possible you shouldn’t need to use a manual. Telling people to always read the manual is a cop out.
Also he apparently read his furnace’s manual and months/years later remembered what a flashing light meant, despite never having had to refer to it again? Either this guy has freakishly good memory (possible but unlikely) or he’s bullshitting. Given the overall tone I’d go with the latter.
And what is even the advantage of knowing in advance? Does he think people would not read the manual after seeing a flashing error light? You can look up most issues when they happen you don’t have to memorise error codes in advance.
This is just a dumb “I’m so great” post.
I agree with you, but reading beforehand has the advantage of knowing what to look out for to keep your device from getting to the “flashing light” stage.
How did they know to do “ls /usr/bin” in the first place?
"For weeks I typed random letters into the command line, and when I entered
ls /usr/binandmanfinally something happened!How did they know how to get to the command line?
Isn’t that what your computer boots into? Mine sure does!
That bit’s just genetic.
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