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

[Charles Howse]

> 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.

I feel your pain, my friend.
I've been scripting bash for quite a while.
Maybe I can contribute something to this thread, here's my list of bookmarks
for bash scripting:

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/toc.htm
http://cfaj.freeshell.org/shell/
http://www.shelldorado.com/
http://home.comcast.net/~j.p.h/cus-faq.html
http://sed.sourceforge.net/sed1line.txt
http://www.student.northpark.edu/pemente/sed/sedfaq.html
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/faq/part1/
http://www.shelldorado.com/goodcoding/cmdargs.html
http://www.macobserver.com/tips/macosxcl101/
http://www.wagoneers.com/UNIX/FIND/find-usage.html
http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/bash/bashref.html
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/