this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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Lol. That's exactly what I did in the early 90s. ls /usr/bin, then man at, or whatever it was that came first, and work onwards from there.
Moreso when I installed my own Unix machine (briefly Minix, quickly replaced by Linux) and had to actually learn how to manage it.
But then I came from a mix of 8 bit, PC and semi big iron (Tandem) culture where any machine you used would matter of factly come with a litteral wall of binders containing documentation for pretty much anything (which led to the fun regular "documentation day" where you had to manually "patch" the documentation by replacing pages in all the binders with updated ones).
Anyway knowing what the fuck you were doing was pretty much expected. So everyone spent a lot of time perusing documentation.
Of course nowadays, to read documentation, you first have to find it, which can be quite a challenge in itself. But at least the manpages are still there.
It's interesting. There's a lot of talk about how chatgpt makes people lazy, but honestly I think Google killed the "read the manual" ethos.
Back in the day when you couldn't just search for everything, you needed enough understanding of the manual to find anything in the index.
So a key part of figuring anything out was reading at least the start of the manual.
Now, fuck it, you just type into Google and try to guess enough context to understand what's going on.
Agreed, finding a manual should always be the first step to solving a problem imo. Even when searching online, I prefer if I can find the official docs/wiki for a piece of software, then search within that.
I used to be a Crew Chief of F-15's in the U.S. AirForce. We had manual patches too. Luckily, that was Supports job duty.