Re: Your stuff is crap but it's free so I'll take it.
man -k/apropos: I've got more UNIX experience than, probably, your age and on more versions than I expect you have heard of.
I use man -k. But the fact is that for a newcomer it is not awfully useful. e.g. Try "man -k search", assuming that the admin has run catman(1) to create /usr/share/man/windex (of course, everyone understands the error message if it has not been done): on the system in front of me I get 107 lines of output to stdout plus an error to stderr. The output gives stuff about ldap, X, compressed files .... find(1) is not in the list. i.e. the find(1) man page does not give "search" in the summary. So, a user wanting to search for a file (rather than thinking he wants to find a file) is out of luck, assuming he found the right entry in the list.
No, your smart-arse answer is just what the complaint concerns and reeks of fear and inexperience when asked a simple question by a naive user, who may not understand or even know about man pages or the man sections and what they mean and is unlikely to consider "man man" to find out.
If volunteers want their efforts to be rewarded by wide acceptance and use, they had better understand about high quality in all of their work, not just some cunning algorithm that they probably found elsewhere.
Torvalds was once an ignorant student. He built on the efforts of helpful and understanding people, whether the original UNIX developers and designers, Minix or his teachers and fellow students. If he is really so wonderful, so all knowing and such a wonderful person, he should develop some tolerance, understanding and an appreciation that the, apparently, silliest questions can be some of the hardest and most useful. He may spend every waking moment in his area of expertise. For most people, it is just a tool to get a job done and their expertise lies elsewhere, just as if you hammer a nail into a wall to hang a picture, no one expects you to be an expert in the making or even best usage of hammers or nails. But you may have the perfect eye for what picture to choose and where to hang it.
I should have thought that the recent, highly publicised matters concerning SSL software, bash and others would have instilled a bit of sobriety and humility in the contributors here.
By the way, I do scan the internet for ideas and answers fairly often. It is horrifying how many people parade themselves as experts and publish a scrap of shell script or python that is screamingly awful, dangerous and ignorant (though in the right circumstances it gets the job done) and are rewarded with responses that "you have saved may life/sanity/day...". I fear that Linux hides a lot of code of that genre that is never caught until it breaks.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
