Date: Sun, 19 Jul 1998 10:28:39 -0700 (PDT) From: patl@phoenix.volant.org To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Cc: FreeBSD Questions <questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Unsetting exported environment variables? Message-ID: <ML-3.3.900869319.3626.patl@asimov> In-Reply-To: <19980719122446.M957@freebie.lemis.com>
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> Man pages are good for finding something if you know what you're > looking for. I never thought there would be an "unset" command, so I > would have needed to read the entire man "page" (68 pages in the case > of bash), which is rather inefficient. I *did* scan it, but I thought > it would be quicker to ask. It was. Imagine what other interesting and useful things you might have discovered if you -had- read it all the way through... Reading man pages, and other documentation, is a great way to avoid re-inventing wheels. I've lost count of the number of clumsy awk or perl invocations I've found in scripts where the venerable cut(1) or paste(1) would have been much cleaner. (And faster.) And that's just the beginning. And even if you have no immediate use for what you find, the knowlege will lurk in the back of your mind waiting for a need to arise. When it does, you might not remember clearly; but you will have a much better idea where to look, and what to look for. -Pat P.S.: This message wasn't really aimed at Greg so much as at all the newbies reading this list and absorbing random clues. I believe that Greg has been around long enough that I expect him to know the advantages or gratuitously reading docs. I can't really fault him for missing something that has been added since he first read the doc; or for being impatient enough to go straight to the list - I've done it myself from time to time. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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