Documenting commands # or $ before sudo? (feditown.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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This might be a stupid question, but hear me out.
I regularly document steps to install various software for myself on my wiki
More recently, I managed to use different custom text in the source markdown to prepend # and $ automatically, so commands can be copied more easily while still clarifying if it should be run as a normal user or as root.

Run command as user

$ some cool command

Run command as root/superuser with sudo

# some dangerous command

I usually remove and sudo and use the # prefix. However, in some cases, the sudo actually does something different that needs to be highlighted. For example, I might use it to execute a command as the user www-data

sudo -u www-data cp /var/www/html/html1 /var/www/html/html2

I often use $ as a prefix, but # would also make sense.
How would you prefix that line?

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[-] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I dislike when documentations add sudo because what if I am root already or what if sudo is not installed on my machine and I cannot just copy and paste the lines because I have to avoid pasting sudo.

Also fyi ArchWiki also uses the # approach.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Can't you just select the text without the sudo prefix..?

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Sometimes the commands contain pipes or &&, which is a minor nitpick, but I still prefer # over sudo in documentation.

this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023

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