Civileme has touched on one of my great frustrations in the Unix world. My
first experience was in installing a HPUX system into the company where I
worked as a financial controller. It sparked an interest.
That developed when I tried out NetBSD on my Amiga (5 years ago). It was my
first experiene of the frustrations of trying to find out how the subject
worked. It also convinced me for a while that Unix was a racket to promote
the sale of manuals - which never semed to answer my questions. Three
manuals at £30/$45 convinced me that answers were more likely if I could
find someone who already knew them AND WAS PREPARED TO SHARE THEM.
I cannot tell you how many times an answer has frustrated me further because
some 'guru' has said in anser to a question something like 'oh you just need
to grep the query through awk and pipe the results where you want them for
later analysis'. Well Duh! What's grep, what's awk and... well,
fortunately I know what the pipe is.
The point is unix, linux, seems to be the last refuge of the propellor head
who tends to guard the domain jealously. It is a large body of work with
great power which is tremendously badly explained. I mean it's all very
well sometimes saying 'man grep' or whatever the command is, as an answer
but often I have already done that. Believe it or not it took me several
hours to make 'find' work for me. A single example properly explained would
have saved all that time. That willingness to go the extra mile and
PROPERLY explain what is going on seems absent.
Maybe propellor heads just assume everyone is as intuitive as them?
I would like to add thought that there do seem to be a larger amount of
querants who just expect an answer without having made any effort of their
own - and expressing a degree of petulnce when that need isn't filled.
Daryl Johnson
Proplan Associates
> > While it is always good advice to "Read the Fine Material"
> available, it is
> > not the only advice to give. Sometimes just a few clues are helpful,
> > sometimes a whole primer needs to be written that _isn't_ in the fine
> > material available, because whoever wrote it wrote it for a different
> > audience with a different background.
[...]
> > If some of us don't provide a bridge to understanding, who will?
> >
> > Linux certainly has more documentation--a whole mountain of it.
> But there
> > is another old adage, "In order to ask the right question, you
> already have
> > to know most of the answer."
> >
> > Civileme
> HOOORAY, finally someone understands the fix a good share of us are in.
> I don't consider myself to be stupid, but, most of the "MAN" pages are
> written in a language it has take 4 years to just start to understand.
> Linux is the HOPE of the future of computing and we need all the
> support from
> everybody with answers to ANY question
[...]
> Thanks Civileme.
> --
> Ken Thompson
> Electrocom Computer Services
>
