Great if you know where to look, but most people who ask themselves the question don't know they have to look up the bash manual in the "redirection" section.
The usual thing (before LLMs) is to Google the question, but for the question to appear in Google, someone has to ask it first, and here we are.
Also the Stackoverflow answers give different perspectives, context, etc... rather than just telling you what it does, which is useful to someone unfamiliar with how redirections work. As I said, someone who doesn't know about "2>&1" is unlikely to be an expert given how common the pattern is, so a little hand holding doesn't hurt.
> Great if you know where to look, but most people who ask themselves the question don't know they have to look up the bash manual in the "redirection" section.
Where else would you look but in the manual of your shell? And you don’t have to know in which section to look, you can just search for “2>&1” in the bash man page.
GuB-42|2 days ago
The usual thing (before LLMs) is to Google the question, but for the question to appear in Google, someone has to ask it first, and here we are.
Also the Stackoverflow answers give different perspectives, context, etc... rather than just telling you what it does, which is useful to someone unfamiliar with how redirections work. As I said, someone who doesn't know about "2>&1" is unlikely to be an expert given how common the pattern is, so a little hand holding doesn't hurt.
layer8|2 days ago
Where else would you look but in the manual of your shell? And you don’t have to know in which section to look, you can just search for “2>&1” in the bash man page.
shevy-java|2 days ago
Google search literally is useless for these days, for Average Joe.
momentoftop|2 days ago
In Emacs, when I hit C-h i I get a menu of all my info manuals and I first read the bash one there.
giglamesh|2 days ago