"Carley, Jason (Australia)" wrote: > >The kindest thing you can do for anyone in difficulty is to persuade him > >that he really does need to study the manual. > > >He shouldn't even be posting questions until he has looked into the matter > >himself and drawn a blank on all fronts. So any question answered in the > >manual deserves either to be totally ignored or to be flamed. It does NOT > >deserve an answer. > > This is a bit strong isn't it? Sometimes newbies don't know how to find the > answer themselves. Unfortunately UNIX skills are not inherently obvious to > all and the information that you find so easy to obtain can sometimes be > tricky for newbies. Hence all the recent discussions on a newbies > information guide. > > Of course people should be encouraged to read the manual pages. But a polite > answer that helps the new user AND points them to where they could have > found it themselves is likely to result in more people taking the time to > learn Linux. To "be totally ignored or ... flamed" is hardly the appropriate > response I am afraid.
> I agree, Jason. I'm not the original poster, but I just now pretended to want the same question answered (how to put a 30-second delay in a script). I thought to myself, I'll look in "man bash". I did a search on "delay", and on "wait", and on "sleep". "sleep", which was the answer to the original problem, was not even found in the bash manual. "delay" and "wait" had no relevance to the problem. So I tried "man script". The script man page had nothing to do with scripting (and didn't have any of the three above-mentioned search words). So as a person looking for the answer, and knowing that I'm going to be told to RTFM, I wonder, "Which manual am I supposed to read for this?" After the fact, I know the correct command is "sleep"; but I still don't know where to find that info; the only place I've seen it mentioned is in this thread. Oh, I just thought to use the "apropos delay" command; it did turn up the "sleep" command, but again, that's not an intuitive step for the non-initiated. I guess what I'm saying is that the uninitiated (newbie or not; he's new to this particular thing) doesn't always know what manual to read, so just yelling RTFM isn't a good solution. Generally when I have a question, my first source of help is the Debian userlist archives, but even that took me a few months to realize the correct search engine to use was at the bottom of the archive page, not the (site-) search button at the top. I understand Michael's frustration at having to answer the same questions 500 times. Maybe a big bold link on the Debian home page that says "Have a question? Look here first" which takes the user directly to the search input box on the mail archive search engine?
