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What's wrong with Stack over man pages? Most man pages don't you give advice or context, just the raw reference, but sometimes the best way to do something is n
by unknown_error 5y ago
What's wrong with Stack over man pages? Most man pages don't you give advice or context, just the raw reference, but sometimes the best way to do something is not even the tool you originally looked up (say, scp vs rsync).
Stack combines the reference (which flags) with the expertise (of educated guesses by sometimes wiser users).
I would never trust a man page over a good Stack answer. (edit: as a web dev who uses *nix all day, but has no desire to become a full fledged sysadmin... Just give me the tool I need to get the job done without sacrificing performance or security. I don't need to know every possible gnu tool and flag and distro dependent options...)
- andrewmcwatters 5y agoYou’re certainly better off reading both. But I have a bigger issue with the fact that developers who use Stack Overflow are more often than not just going to copy and paste and not understand what they’re doing. And that’s predominantly how the site is used. Yeah, there are plenty of manpages that are verbose, but frankly a lot of them are easier to parse than reading hacked together Stack Overflow answers that don’t explain how the poster arrived at their answer. They literally don’t show their work.