Re: your xkcd cartoon

Very often, I find people with much more experience and knowledge than me know do know *exactly* what to do. And it's a huge time savings to be able to tap their brains. If they don't have the time the answer or don't know the answer, that's fine, I'm not demanding an answer. They can ignore me. However, if I'm lucky enough to find someone who does know the exact answer and is generous enough to take time out of their day to help me, I'm very grateful. Moreover, posting my dumb ass questions and having others answer them will help other newbs in the future who have the same problem. Thanks to the person I found on Google who posted about this issue 5 years ago and gave me almost the exact command I needed to type to solve my issue, I was able to get over the obstacle and focus more on my immediate task at hand. And thanks to the high search ranking Perlmonks gets, I'm sure 5 or 10 other people who see this post and will also be helped with an exact command to get the job done so they can move on to whatever task they were trying to achieve. I'm sure they'll also be greatly entertained by our little flame war.

Yes, I read documentation. I do my best to figure things out on my own because often that's faster and a more satisfying route. But I also know my own abilities and I know when a manual isn't going to help me much no matter how many times I read it. And at the risk of repeating myself: manuals have limitations. If they aren't aimed at the comprehension level of the audience reading them, they aren't going to help much. And they can't help much with edge cases unless you really know what's going on under the hood and can piece together a solution based on the clues given by the manual.

Yes, I read documentation.

You said you glanced at the documentation. Your facts are wrong and you're misrepresenting your argument in this thread