I'm thinking of this in a "pitfalls of being self-taught" context, but I'm sure there's plenty of other places these moments happen. Feel free to also interpret the title as "How did I not know that?", "How did I miss that?", "Why did no one tell me that?" and the like!

The inspiration for this post is that I am over a year and a half into my Linux journey, which has involved a solid amount of tinkering and eagerly getting familiar with the command line, and I just now realized that you can do man <literally any command> to quickly get to the manual for it. And also that whatis exists. For the last 18+ months, I've been just doing <command> --help or <command> <subcommand> --help and searching the internet to supplement that. I knew that man pages exist, but I guess for some reason it didn't occur to me that there would be a way to access them that easily.

I love learning things on my own and building understanding by doing, just picking a direction and running with it, but... man. I often wonder how many little things that "everyone knows" I've missed through sheer random chance. And then there's things like my man pages revelation that I can't believe I didn't piece together on my own, considering all the other crazy stuff I've figured out. Oh well lol. I suppose it's good when the humbling reminders of my own capacity for ignorance arrive via something low-stakes like this than via something that could wreck my system!

Anyone else have similar stories to share?