I get confused every time I install a distro and man isn't installed by default. I guess I get the bare minimum philosophy, but it throws me off every time. First thing I install is vim, man, git, and probably a couple other things I can't remember right now.
I do like a decent man page that has examples for us dummies and I have found that they have improved a lot over the years.
The best was on arch because I had no idea how to use pacman, which I needed to install man, when I needed how to use pacman. I will have to take a look at tldr. I mostly use Debian without a desktop environment, but have an Arch VM for gaming here and there. Works out.
Agreed, in any context where I'd open man I'd rather tldr instead. If you needed to read chunks of documentation like in man I'd rather just google the docs instead than clunkily try to read in terminal.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
How can you feel good about yourself if you aren't shaming people with less technical capabilities? Next you'll say something crazy like believing in yourself. Nonsense, crazy person. Get out of here.
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?
