Linux Bug #1: Bad Documentation

"It's a way to guarantee having fewer users, unhappy users, and fewer contributors.

"Let me share with you how I spent much of the past week. (Lately I've been spending a lot of time wrestling with application problems; this is just one example.) A certain application that I use every day was failing on one command and returning this fine unhelpful error message:

Finished with exit status 1

"Oh goody, how illuminating. So I look in the man page and none of the error codes are explained. The command does not generate any logfile entries. Good so far, a promising start. Next stop, Google. Google finds a fair number of other users with the same problem, but no solution."

Complete Story

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