4 ms·

I agree that other tools may be more user friendly, but if users are blindly copying and not really understanding what commands do then that is partly on them a

I agree that other tools may be more user friendly, but if users are blindly copying and not really understanding what commands do then that is partly on them and lack of documentation. Arch Wiki provides a ton of options to copy a disk image and so it is one place that does show other options.

deleted 4y ago
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_dain_ 4y ago
I honestly didn't know that dd just did the same thing as cp or cat. I thought you had to use it for making bootable USBs because it was doing some kind of special arcane magic behind the scenes .. this intuition was reinforced by the fact that so many GUI tools purporting to make bootable USBs are so unreliable. If literally all you have to do is copy bytes from one place to another, why the fuck do those tools fail so often? Doing this kind of thing is a) rare and b) usually you have more things on your mind at the time, so you tend to be quite conservative and not think to experiment.
- notacoward 4y ago
  > special arcane magic It doesn't really do anything particularly arcane (unless you count EBCDIC conversions) but it does things that are useful and often necessary that other equally-standard utilities can't. Isn't that good enough? > Doing this kind of thing is a) rare Probably not as rare as you think. Maybe it's not all that useful for writing applications, but for the quite large number of people who have to do provisioning (either bare-metal or virtual) and such it's a different matter. There's a lot to be said for tools that are ubiquitous, well standardized, and flexible.
ddulaney 4y ago
I’d say that a big part of it is a lack of discoverability. The reason people copy blindly, especially if they’re new to Unix-likes, is that there are lots of commands with lots of flags, each of which you just kinda have to know about. And they work together reasonably well (except when they don’t), but going from “I need to accomplish this task” to a particular command is generally going to require a Google.
- musha68k 4y ago
  Or a man page :P
  - ddulaney 4y ago
    But that’s the issue — discoverability. How to get from “I want to search” to man grep or “I plugged in my USB drive and need to get at the files” to man mount/man fstab/man something else. man pages are a decent reference once you know what you’re looking for (assuming they’re up to date, correct, and present on your system) but they aren’t anything like a replacement for Google.
    - abbeyj 4y ago
      $ apropos search ... grep (1p) - search a file for a pattern ...
      - ddulaney 4y ago
        On each of the two machines I have immediate access to: $ apropos search apropos: Command not found. Aside from the obvious, man pages just aren’t the answer most of the time. Part of the issue is that a man page is a reference. This is a necessary kind of documentation, but sometimes I want a tutorial and sometimes I want a cookbook. References are great for some things, but discovering new tools isn’t generally one of them. Obviously, you don’t have to write man pages that way, but almost all of the ones I see in the wild are. Another part is that man pages as a resource have really atrophied in my experience. Lots of new CLI tools don’t have them at all, and lots of systems don’t have them installed even for older/core tools. The why is harder. I suspect that it’s a mix of tooling (e.g. needing to learn groff/troff to write them), search (your man pages aren’t indexed by Google by default like your GitHub readme), and culture. But I’m not sure.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

_dain_ 4y ago

I honestly didn't know that dd just did the same thing as cp or cat. I thought you had to use it for making bootable USBs because it was doing some kind of special arcane magic behind the scenes .. this intuition was reinforced by the fact that so many GUI tools purporting to make bootable USBs are so unreliable. If literally all you have to do is copy bytes from one place to another, why the fuck do those tools fail so often? Doing this kind of thing is a) rare and b) usually you have more things on your mind at the time, so you tend to be quite conservative and not think to experiment.

notacoward 4y ago
> special arcane magic It doesn't really do anything particularly arcane (unless you count EBCDIC conversions) but it does things that are useful and often necessary that other equally-standard utilities can't. Isn't that good enough? > Doing this kind of thing is a) rare Probably not as rare as you think. Maybe it's not all that useful for writing applications, but for the quite large number of people who have to do provisioning (either bare-metal or virtual) and such it's a different matter. There's a lot to be said for tools that are ubiquitous, well standardized, and flexible.

ddulaney 4y ago

I’d say that a big part of it is a lack of discoverability. The reason people copy blindly, especially if they’re new to Unix-likes, is that there are lots of commands with lots of flags, each of which you just kinda have to know about. And they work together reasonably well (except when they don’t), but going from “I need to accomplish this task” to a particular command is generally going to require a Google.

musha68k 4y ago
Or a man page :P
- ddulaney 4y ago
  But that’s the issue — discoverability. How to get from “I want to search” to man grep or “I plugged in my USB drive and need to get at the files” to man mount/man fstab/man something else. man pages are a decent reference once you know what you’re looking for (assuming they’re up to date, correct, and present on your system) but they aren’t anything like a replacement for Google.
  - abbeyj 4y ago
    $ apropos search ... grep (1p) - search a file for a pattern ...
    - ddulaney 4y ago
      On each of the two machines I have immediate access to: $ apropos search apropos: Command not found. Aside from the obvious, man pages just aren’t the answer most of the time. Part of the issue is that a man page is a reference. This is a necessary kind of documentation, but sometimes I want a tutorial and sometimes I want a cookbook. References are great for some things, but discovering new tools isn’t generally one of them. Obviously, you don’t have to write man pages that way, but almost all of the ones I see in the wild are. Another part is that man pages as a resource have really atrophied in my experience. Lots of new CLI tools don’t have them at all, and lots of systems don’t have them installed even for older/core tools. The why is harder. I suspect that it’s a mix of tooling (e.g. needing to learn groff/troff to write them), search (your man pages aren’t indexed by Google by default like your GitHub readme), and culture. But I’m not sure.