Hacker News Reader

Comment by gunnihinn | Hacker News Reader

A counterpoint: dd survives not because it's good or makes sense, but explicitly because it doesn't.

You wanna format a usb key? Google this, copy/paste these dd instructions, it works, move on with your life.

You wanna format a usb key using something related to cat you once saw and didn't fully understand? Have fun.

Both approaches have their weak points, but in any OS the answer to "How do I format a usb key" should not start with "Oh boy, let's have a Socratic dialog over 10 years on how to do that."

View on HN

This probably has more truth than most unix admins would like to admin.

"Why do we do it like that? I dunno, that's how I learned how, how do you do it?"

Definitely this. I have found many times that I'm an offender of these "bad practices", and usually that's because a certain pattern I learned way back in the beginnings of my Linux days still hangs around.

Embarrassingly, it took me a long time before I started reaching for man pages instead of Google. That has probably has had the biggest effect on tightening up my command line fu.

find is another tool that seems to get only one specific use case that ignores its rather large and useful toolset.

I learned Linux this way a decade and a half ago when it was far (and still is imho!) more convenient to quickly search a man page than google something. (with slow internet start times, browser startup times, etc)

Now, sometimes when people watch me work in a shared session they comment on my "peculiar" (to them) usage of flipping between -h --help and man $command, because there's a whole lot of switches I have memorized over time, but even more that I just have good reference points for.

But, bar none, what I've noticed among my peers is that the people that have always bowed to quick google solutions never really have taken the time to learn what they're doing. They almost always seems to be the 'quick fix', 'get it working now, sort it out later' types.

I often use google to find the answer, then go read the man page for it.

Isn't that what mkfs.* is for?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com