David C. Rankin said the following on 01/08/2009 12:02 PM:
Anton Aylward wrote:
Erik Jakobsen said the following on 01/08/2009 11:11 AM:
Many thanks for the replies to my query. Not that I understand much of it, but I will study the man page, and hope I get more insight. Isn't there an O'reilly book or page on it?
No book needed.
In konqueror just enter #rsync or from the cli, just do rsync --help or man rsync. The man page is really quite good.
There's a reason people buy the O'Reilly books: they add value.
They give real world examples and discuss the 'why' and talk about the
pitfalls.
Us more experienced (or more willing to spend time etc experimenting)
types know the 'culture' and assumptions that go into many of the man
pages and subsystems, but one can't assume that to be a universal. Much
of the O'Reilly texts show those variations and extend the examples. As
I said "they add value". That *you* don't need them, that *you* have
time to experiment - and that means learning from failures, often
catastrophic ones! - doesn't mean everyone else is so well off. Some of
us need specific fixes to specific problems.
I look back over the time when I had the freedom(s) needed to learn by
making mistakes, and boy did I make them! I'm very glad of that, but I
have to face the fact that new stuff comes by and not all man pages are
clear and comprehensive. On top of that I have to deal with people form
the MS-Windows and and MAC world who don't have the cultural backgrounds
to make sense of comments like "You can tune a file system, but you
can't tune a fish" or why might use single quotes rather than double
quotes in a shell script (since they didn't grow up with scripting in
the first place!) or write ${VARIABLE} instead of $VARIABLE ...
And having recently moved from RH/Mandriva to openSUSE, there are a lot
of openSUSE "assumptions" that are catching me out.
--
The Internet is not the greatest threat to information security;
stupidity is the greatest threat to information security.
- Will Spencer