> Thankfully, like you said, there is now Stack Overflow. It's interesting because we can imagine a history where the docs were written much more professionall

> Thankfully, like you said, there is now Stack Overflow. It's interesting because we can imagine a history where the docs were written much more professionally with such examples. And we can imagine that work having lowered the barrier to entry such that a critical mass of users becoming compositionally literate in shell scripting. (And perhaps shellcheck being written much earlier in this alternate history.) But Stack Overflow not only obsoletes such an effort, it IMO obsoletes becoming literate in shell scripting, at least in the way the author describes. SO's existence is equivalent to being able to write a natural language query on the command line which "automorphs" into the relevant Stack Overflow example. At that point you just need to understand basic piping, redirection, and enough of the syntax to spot-check the magic answer in order to make small changes for a use case. That's a different kind of skill.