How to know latest way of doing things?
Re: the recent exchange on how to add a new userid to a Linux system:
Patrick Kirk wrote:
> Thanks. I didn't even know there was a command adduser! Why is it better
> than useradd?
As a newby myself, this hit a nerve. How are we to know that adduser is
a later (therefore better) version of useradd? That's just a guess at
the history, but remember, there are a bunch of old documents out there
that will still be describing the old version of things months and perhaps
years after the gurus purge their mental caches of a "solved problem".
I setup PCMCIA ether networking on my Fujitsu running Debian using the
general network setup data in the "Running Linux" book. It actually works,
but it was only months later I discovered the PCMCIA package stuff that
has a real nice automatic infrastructure for issuing the ifconfig and
route statements that I was semimanually entering.
How is a newby to know that "adduser" is preferable to "useradd" when a
"man user" just pops both out? How was I to know to read the PCMCIA stuff
instead of the general networking stuff in "Running"?
KUTGW
--
Charles B. (Ben) Cranston
mailto:zben@ni.umd.edu
http://www.wam.umd.edu/~zben
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