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by AStonesThrow 637 days ago
Sure, it's annoying and pedantic to nitpick someone's helpful answers and snippets. But sometimes the goal is to foster a better understanding, and reduce superstition and cargo-culting.

"sync<CR>sync<CR>sync<CR>reboot<CR>" became an idiom for various reasons. Then it became "sync; sync; sync; reboot" and deemed equivalent, which was missing the point that physically pressing "enter" introduced some human-length pauses into the process. Then "reboot(8)" incorporated those syncs, and "shutdown(8)" provided more flexibility, but the idiom persisted.

And to this day, the tier-1 support script says to clear your cookies and cache, try a different browser, factory reset your phone, disable firewall, disable AV, reboot your router, bypass your switch and plug in one device directly, wait 15 minutes and try again, and we've abandoned all attempts to understand, diagnose, or find root causes when the underlying systems are too diverse and complex to understand or keep your tech's expertise up-to-date.
1 comments
Retr0id 637 days ago
Not memorizing all of sudo's flags isn't cargo culting, and neither is using cat to improve clarity.
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AStonesThrow 637 days ago
Strawman--nobody said that. All I suggest is that if you wish to accomplish a particular task, then read the manual at that point, and find relevant ways to invoke the command.

The options I've memorized over the years are the ones I've used the most often, and this inertia can lead to ignorance, unless I periodically revisit the manual page to see what else can be done.

Every IT/CS instructor will tell you that your source of truth is the vendor's documentation. Don't waste your time Googling Stackexchange when the manual pages are available right on the system, on a website, or however. The manual pages are written by the developers and tech writers to specifically tell you how to use these commands.

You can either "cat for clarity" for the rest of your career, or you can learn new methods like shell redirects, "tee(1)", "exec <file; while read var; do cmd; done". I wouldn't be surprised if people start their careers thinking that "cat" is just for starting up a pipeline. Other students may be taught that "cat" is an elementary way to just put file contents on their terminal screen, and then they'll subsequently learn how "more(1)" is superior in this regard.

"When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

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