Hello Linux community.
I’d like to take a moment to explain what I hope will be a simple concept (so really it’s more of a reminder) that everyone should say least know and understand.
Not everyone (myself included) learns best by RTFM. Some of us need a guiding hand or to watch a video instead. It’s not that we’re lazy or don’t like reading, it’s just that it doesn’t work efficiently enough.
“RTFM” (or similar comments like “it’s in the docs”) are just mean and useless without a reference.
Like, okay, superior user in the internet: If it’s in the manual/docs, what page? Do you have a link? Could you quote the relevant section?
Often people ask because they couldn’t find the answer in the docs. Simply pointing them at the answer is infinitely better than “lol the answer is in there somewhere”
See also: “Let me Google that for you…” Like mf Google brought me to this thread!
I agree that “RTFM” can be insensitive, and even mean. However, the place it comes from is genuine. It’s nobodies job to tell you exactly what page to look at. If you’ve dug through the docs and still can’t find your answer, make it explicit that you’ve searched the manual, and perhaps be explicit about parts you don’t quite understand.
The whole “RTFM” thing was born from people asking for help when they obviously hadn’t made a proper try themselves first.
often on linux, you can simply type
man <command>and get TFMi would agree with you about GUI apps, where it can be confusing.
Yeah, that’s what I meant by “the manual”. Though I suppose the Linux community is the most likely to be flipping through a physical book to figure out their bash script.
What’s worse, is if this is GNU-ware, there is a good chance the answer IS NOT IN THE MAN PAGE. I think it was bash or maybe gawk. I don’t remember exactly, but I had a question that simply wasn’t answered in each man page. GNU docs are absolute trash, written without any consideration for the audience.
I think GNU favors the info tool, try that if the man page is lacking.
I feel like every time I’ve gone looking for an info page, it was just the man page content, but now I’ve got some useless shit I installed.
I mean, maybe this is a debian thing.