[GRLUG] dumb questions [Was: Dumb rsync question]

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Wed, 2013-02-27 at 16:30 -0600, Don Ellis wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 4:14 PM, L. V. Lammert <lvl at omnitec.net>
> wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Feb 2013, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> >>What you probably want is the --relative option.
> >Yep! That's what I said, .. dumb question <g>!
> I disagree.

I disagree with your disagreement. :)  There very much is a such thing
as a dumb question - I should know, I ask them *all the time*!
Frequently I find the answer almost immediately after giving up on
finding the answer and posting the question somewhere.

> Lists like this should have a practice of regularly asking a question
> that everyone should know the answer of, but just might not (or might
> have slipped from memory).

I agree; sometimes someone tosses out a 'new' answer to an old question.
And asking doesn't cost anything.

But I'm still waiting for someone to tell me how to specify a filter to
the ss command that applies to the inode of the socket...

>  but would like further instruction on. Remember, the man pages were
> mostly meant to refresh our memory of something we already know, but
> are seldom really helpful for learning a new feature.

And really that is all that can be expected of them.  As someone who has
spent a considerable number of hours creating presentations and writing
technical documents - explaining the *WHY* of something is crazy
extremely more difficult than explaining to someone who already gets the
WHY what the syntax of the HOW is.  WHY requires at least some imaginary
use-case, and most HOWs have innumerable real-world use-cases that may
or may not correspond to the given reader's WHY or the fantastical case
the author devises.

This is why LUGs and technical conferences are so valuable, I almost
always get at least one 'ha! holy crap, that is so obvious... now that
you've shown it to me.'

And I'll add a plug for long command line options;  for example with
rsync: "--recursive" is much better than "-R"... or was that "-r", argh!
But "--recursive" is much more obvious,  especially at 2AM.  

Indent and comment your code - and use long parameters/switches in
scripts and documentation.