• chuso@kbin.social
        271·
        7 months ago

        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.

        • CapeWearingAeroplane@sopuli.xyz
          15·
          7 months ago

          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…

          • chuso@kbin.social
            6·
            7 months ago

            Oh, yeah. I had this situation so many times in this same project. Even pointing them to the documentation and telling them to read it because the explanation was there didn’t even work because they just wanted immediate answers. Sometimes I even had to join them on a call and tell them to stop, open the link on a screenshare and read it out loud to me to make sure they were actually reading it and not just telling me they read it.
            It felt like teaching to read to first-grade schoolers.

        • drolex@sopuli.xyz
          10·
          7 months ago

          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?

          • chuso@kbin.social
            5·
            7 months ago

            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.

            • chuso@kbin.social
              2·
              7 months ago

              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.

              • Kühe sind toll@feddit.de
                3·
                7 months ago

                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.

          • chuso@kbin.social
            1·
            7 months ago

            What people? If you are referring to the people I mentioned in my example who don’t read the text next to the commands explaining what they do, that seems to be also the output tealdeer produces, so I don’t know how it would help.

            • Rustmilian@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              7 months ago

              They’re man pages that are significantly reduced and only include the common commands. People who copy paste, do so usually because the directions or manual are too long and it intimates their feeble minds.

      • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world
        41·
        7 months ago

        I’m starting to see this a lot. Some man-pages are very verbose and one might not have the time, but for the most part, opening a man page and lessing through it doesn’t take too long, and it’s usually up-to-date

    • abbadon420@lemm.ee
      8·
      7 months ago

      They’re the best. I mean, just look at the alternative that Windows offers… oh wait there isn’t any.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.world
      1·
      7 months ago

      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.

  • Antithetical@lemmy.deedium.nl
    56·
    7 months ago

    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.

  • Yer Ma@lemm.ee
    494·
    7 months ago

    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

  • gerryflap@feddit.nl
    23·
    7 months ago

    Man pages save me an online search multiple times per week. Not sure that you’re no about

  • Count Regal Inkwell@pawb.social
    2·
    7 months ago

    The only “issue” with man pages is that they open in less and less is a bit too – Vim-y. So you end up needing to read a manual on how to read manuals?