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My biggest annoyance with man pages are that built-ins are a separate command and that there is no way to print all man pages but the first with the man command. That’s right. There’s no way to print every page for a command, 1 through 7 or whatever, with a flag. I am confidently saying there’s no way to do it.
👀
Hoping someone wants to correct me because I want an alias that prints all pages as one. Would also be nice if it did it for built-ins.
I just learned about “man thing” in terminal a couple days ago. I had no idea they’re kept in that folder.
Part of the fun of buying a game was getting to RTFM on the way home.
public transit, ftw… unless “I wish I died pecefully like my grandfather… the driver who was RTFMing, instead of his screaming passengers”
Last time I could buy a game with an instruction manual I was lucky that I could ride in a car without a car seat.
Imagine reading manuals lmao
I don’t bother with manuals any more. I never manage to retain much information unless I need it right now. Way easier to just fumble along and find what I need when I need it and cobble together a half-baked “understanding”.
Should go get some ADHD meds one day.
I’ve been using Linux for about a year now, I have no clue what is even in /usr/bin …you people have manuals?! I needed a manual to find the thing.
You can look at the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard for starters.
About manuals, tryman manin the command line, then something likeman ls.Keep in mind this is FreeBSD, but this is the perfect structure that FreeBSD obeys.
Linux distros fuck it up on a daily basis. App devs interpret it themselves and fuck it up even further.
But if you dont know what etc, usr or bin or local means, it should give you a better understanding. Navigating docs, manuals and commands should be easier.
Most app devs fuck it up (especially the lazy bastards that just throw everything in /opt and call it a day). I like being the dev who won’t let my code ship until everything fits nicely into FHS 3.0.
There’s dozens of us.
Just type in man <your binary> to go through the binary manual, also called man page :)
try to RTFM for Microsoft…lol shits updated too much and all the old information is still there and outdated. convoluted mess of shit is all they are
still, RTFM…always
Have you tried sfc /scannow?
I just want to say I’m glad other people understand how ridiculous of a suggestion this is for fixing Windows problems. It has become such a low effort nonsensical approach because people don’t truly understand what it does and it feels like doing something. It’s the new ‘have you tried turning it off and on again.’ dism and sfc. Then when someone mentions how absurd the thinking is that this fixes anything but a small negligible fraction of issues, someone always chimes in how there was this one time where it worked for them. Perpetuating this low effort, almost useless approach to troubleshooting. I’ve fixed more issues with BIOS updates than I have with either of those tools.
I’ve just reinstalled windows every few years to deal with the unfixable issues
Microsoft documentation actually sucks information out of your brain and leaves you knowing less than before you read it.
This is a problem with more than just Microsoft. Any software (game, application, library, whatever) that has had many years of updates some of which are breaking, will have this problem with docs.
Oh you are using version 5.5.24 of xyzlib? All these docs are a mixture of stuff when 4.2.57 was out and stuff someone tried to update when 7.5.14 released.
Or the documentation is basically empty and tells you nothing at all (looking at you WinRT…)
In order to RTFM one must first WTFM
And FTFM. Find the fucking manual.
And perhaps TTFM. Translate the fucking manual either from broken chinese-english or the tech-lingo + missing context information which is almost every manpage on Linux, making it nearly useless for the average user unless you got hours and hours of time to understand all the adjacent concepts and commands.
Keeping the common user stupid is the better part of Mickeysoft’s business model. The proposed solution for every problem is guessing what MS’ silly nomenclature might actually mean while poking around in GUIs that do nothing but keep you busy. Then buy something from their app store. RTFM doesn’t work in a system that’s inconsistent and undocumented by design. That’s not the fault of RTFM as a concept but a travesty of it.
Unironically, if you bing Windows API related queries rather than googling them, you’re much more likely to find a relevant manual page that answers your question clearly. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google is actively worsening Windows-related queries to make Windows look bad and sell Android devices and Chromebooks. Another example is that googling msvcp140.dll not found or similar queries gives you loads of dodgy download this individual DLL here and put it in System32 and we promise we’ve not tampered with it websites instead of the page for the universal MSVC redistributable installer that’s the only supported way to get the DLL (and a bunch of other related ones) as an end user.
As for silly nomenclature, generally on Windows, API functions are much more likely to describe what they do and much less likely to be a town in Wales. If you don’t already know what
fstatdoes, it’s much easier to guess thatGetFileTimewould be the right function to get a file’s last modification time thanfstat, for example.I have been told that the reason their publically available training, problem solving, and educational material is so terrible is because there is a secret printed guidebook somewhere that makes everything make sense and if everyone had it it could negatively impact the windows economy.
I do not know if that is true, but I have been told it and it does kind of explain why sites like learn.microsoft.com are so terrible that I would rather treat the world book encyclopedia 1969 edition from A to Z including the index than try to figure out how to run a single powershell command from the educational materials available on that site.
MSFT’s strategy is anti-documentation.
You want help?
Money Please!
(For clarity, I am being cheeky, but I am not joking.)
I mean in general, “read things -> learn” is a good approach to life imo.
Too long and difficult. I’ll let chat gpt tell me instead and read that between adverts on Love Island
I’ll be honest, I’m guilty of using Chat GPT at times for stuff I know barely anything about and know I probably won’t be able to find through research as quickly as I’d like to. I always try the old-fashioned way of using a search engine first, go through reddit and forums and stuff, but sometimes I just need to use AI for a good first pointer
It’s not a terrible idea. ChatGPT is great at summarizing info, especially stuff you’d use manuals for. I make sure to ask it where certain info came from (so I can try to verify) OR having it explain its approach so I get it in the future.
we’re cooked
Grok, is this true?
Agreed. I’ve saved so much money by RTFM. As a father of three kids, every dollar saved means a better life for my family.
Car broken? RTFM, bought an ODBII scanner, and fixed it.
Need air conditioning? RTFM and installed my own heat pumps in my house, saving $7000 in labor and markup.
House has an old 60 amp fuse panel? Paid an electrician for the service upgrade, read the NEC, wired and installed all branch circuits and sub panels myself. Passed inspection. Saved $7500.
When you take the time to learn something, you not only get the satisfaction of using your own hands to accomplish something, but you also get to save money.
Lol. That’s exactly what I did in the early 90s. ls /usr/bin, then man at, or whatever it was that came first, and work onwards from there.
Moreso when I installed my own Unix machine (briefly Minix, quickly replaced by Linux) and had to actually learn how to manage it.But then I came from a mix of 8 bit, PC and semi big iron (Tandem) culture where any machine you used would matter of factly come with a litteral wall of binders containing documentation for pretty much anything (which led to the fun regular “documentation day” where you had to manually “patch” the documentation by replacing pages in all the binders with updated ones).
Anyway knowing what the fuck you were doing was pretty much expected. So everyone spent a lot of time perusing documentation.Of course nowadays, to read documentation, you first have to find it, which can be quite a challenge in itself. But at least the manpages are still there.
I used to be a Crew Chief of F-15’s in the U.S. AirForce. We had manual patches too. Luckily, that was Supports job duty.
God yes. I absolutely LOVE a well written manual.
Even if you THINK you know how a thing works, it’s always good to find out the quirks and gotchas, not to mention functionality that might not be obvious at first glance.
In fact, I read the manuals before buying an item or piece of software. They tend to be much more enlightening about a product’s limitations than the marketing material is.
Conversely, it really annoys the fuck out of me when people come on forums and ask a really basic question that’s answered on page 2 of the manual. It shows that someone is incredibly lazy and incapable of basic problem solving. And they have the audacity to get offended when you tell them it’s covered in the manual.
I work in IT. I’ve read so many manuals that I don’t need to read manuals almost ever.
As soon as you learn the design language for stuff, it usually just makes sense where to find stuff and how to fix it. It’s rare that I have a problem that I can’t solve just by looking at it.
If I ever get stuck, guess what? I RTFM. That’s basically my job. I RTFM because end users can’t be arsed to do it themselves. If everyone read the manual, I’d be out of a job.
In many cases you get hired for having the knowledge and experience instead of just having skills.
quick everyone, stop RTFM ! save this man’s job !
Lol. I think it’s more likely that I’ll win the lottery than users RTFM enough for me to worry about my job.
It’s just a funny thought that any of them would try.
I dread the day the users read the manual
I doubt that day will ever come
Many linux CLI tools also tend to have similar names for arguments with similar effects.
That also reduces the re-reading.
I think a lot of documentation just fly over my head. I have a masters degree in mathematics, but so many manuals have such deeply ingrained “tribal” language that everyone takes for granted that you know.
If you have a good starting point for a poor linux noob to read manuals, hit me up.
(That being said, I DO read the manuals for appliances and all that. THAT stuff is luckily easy)
copypasta levels
Y’all not just out there vibe OSing?
