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by hibbelig 1920 days ago
I have been in the position of having spent hours to figure it out myself. And I believe I’ve learned more in the process.
1 comments

I hope and expect that you did learn more in hours than what you could have learned in two minutes.

If you had spent those same hours after two minutes of support, you might have learned even more.

No! Because I wouldn't have done all the failing things.

Example: I am a Unix user and I want to delete a directory. But I don't know how to do that. So I say "ls /bin" and think that maybe the "d" in "dd" has something to do with delete directory (and "df" is delete file?), and so I do "man dd". So I get some idea what "dd" can do. (Deleting directories is not one of them, though, it seems) I also find "unlink" which seems promising, but that one can't delete directories, only files.

If I had asked you, and you would have told me "rmdir", then I would never have learned about "dd" and "unlink".

It's just an example; I wasn't sure I could come up with something more realistic from actual development.