Re: Possibly Off Topic Rant

[Chet Ramey]

Ray Parrish wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm a fairly new user in Linux, and I've been studying and attempting to
> use the commands available to me at the command line by reading the man
> and info pages. I'm running into lots of problems determining the proper
> syntax for many of the commands due to very sketchy documentation.
> 
> I'm winding up trying some commands over and over again, as I attempt to
> discover the apparently secret twists to the syntax required to get a
> command to do it's thing. After many tries I sometimes finally get it
> right, and there is no mention in the docs of the requirement for the
> use of specific syntax options I eventually discover are required to use
> a command.
> 
> I consider this a bug in the documentation, and think it would be nice
> if the documentation writers would add a --verbose --verbose switch to
> their writing behaviors when producing man pages.

There are literally hundreds of books available on Unix use, programming,
and shell scripting.  They fill this niche, not manual pages.

Chet


-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer

Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/