> On Mon, Jul 26, 1999 at 08:18:48AM +0200, Gerhard Kroder wrote: > > > ever RTFM for bash? it says: > > I love how people insist on firing off this remark. It is sooo much more > explanatory than pasting in a piece of the manpage then breaking it > down to a newbies' terms. Then _calmly_ telling them (OFF THE LIST) that th= > ey > should RTFM without using the RTFM flame. I just think we spend way too much > time falming, and not enough time correcting these people who neglect to re= > ad > the docs. Just my 2 cents.
People start to say it after they have politely answered the same question approximately 500 times. There are about 10,000 new newbies coming onto the Internet every day, all with the same cluelessness and the same questions. Every day, every week, every month, every year. The manual should only need to be written once, not thousands of times. The person who did write it is usually best qualified to do so. You seem to think anyone else in the world can express the matter better than the original author. If you were to read the bash manual page yourself you would see that it is a brilliant piece of writing that no-one is going to better. The kindest thing you can do for anyone in difficulty is to persuade him that he really does need to study the manual. He shouldn't even be posting questions until he has looked into the matter himself and drawn a blank on all fronts. So any question answered in the manual deserves either to be totally ignored or to be flamed. It does NOT deserve an answer. It is bad netiquette to paste part of the man page, because it creates traffic delivering something that the recipient already has. And no-one owes the newbie that kind of favor. He can cut from the man page himself. He has it, and he can do it. The rest of us are busy people and life is running out. Help where it is needed is one thing. A crutch for the lazy, or foolishly trying to do for someone else what he must surely do for himself, merely because he sent a message out into the wide world, is quite another.
