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I Didn’t Learn Unix by Reading All the Manpages (owlfolio.org)
2 points by bubblehack3r on Nov 14, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment



Strangely enough, I did learn Unix by reading the man pages.

Way back around 1990, I came across a low-cost Version 7 clone of Unix called 'Coherent'. Along with several floppies containing the software came a large 400-500 page book that was mostly a reprint of the Coherent man-pages.

https://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/mark-williams-...

Coming from MSDOS, I had to learn Unix from the ground up.* That 'manual' was a godsend in telling me what CLI commands existed and what they did.

* I especially discovered very rapidly why you should run your computer as a 'normal user' rather than as 'root' by running the simple command 'rm -fr .*' while in the /tmp directory while doing some 'tidying up'




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