Read the manual and touch every button! The most important lesson my father ever taught me was that you can’t break software permanently. We can always fix it, worst case we just install it again. Computers are toys and I played without fear

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.

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.

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.

He skips over the extremely important points of first knowing that a manual exists and knowIng how to access it. Then knowing what all the jargon means and what the manual doesn’t say because its written assuming a high level of knowledge already.

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.

Have you seen the manuals today? 90% of the content for a product manual is CYA. In the next year or so they will all be written by AI.

Also, different people have different learning styles. A manual is just one. Many of us learn better by having something real to do, and learning by doing.

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 got started programming by reading the manual of my TI calculator during a boring history class. It really does work.

ls /usr/sbin/ if you’re hardcore.

I had a problem with sendmail about 20 years ago, for several days I tried ro fix it, the only way I fixed it was reading the manual, not the whole manual because about half I read what was i doing wrong.

If everything else fails, read the manual

RTFM FTW

Hahaha. Most here making excuses why they don’t read manuals.

Actually, several hours of cursing and trying are an excellent substitute for up to three minutes of manpage reading.

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 go kill %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”