Why questions don't get answered, or "No, I've already RTFM, tell me the answer!"

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 29 December 2005 22:36, Les Mikesell wrote:
>On Thu, 2005-12-29 at 21:07, Gene Heskett wrote:
>> >It would greatly help if most of the man pages included examples
>> > of usage.
>>
>> Hear hear!!
>
>Often the man pages have examples of the way the author expected
>the program to be used.  However, there's still a good chance
>that isn't exactly what you want to do with it.

I submit to you all the manpages for bash.

Paragraph after paragraph of explanation of this option and that option 
in a quite verbose manner, and not a single actual example of a 
command line, and the results it should return.  That makes writing 
even a 10 line bash script into an extended reading and re-reading 
session with heavy use of the manpages builtin grep because its so 
poorly organized that the complete answer may be in 3 or more places 
scattered through it.  And the chances of it doing what you wanted on 
the first execution are slim to zip.  Bash scripts can be made to do 
litterally anything you need them to do, but...  So I come to one of 
these lists and ask for help, finally getting acceptable results in 
3-4 days, often using a method thats not at all clear in the manpages.  
The help I have received on one list or another has often been far 
more clearly and concisely stated than the manpages for bash that I 
have printed out and bound, and read from end to end probably 30 times 
now.

I rest my case.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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Copyright 2005 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.