ssh connects and logs into the specified destination, which may be specified as either [user@]hostname or a URI of the form ssh://[user@]hostname[:port]
That’s how I would interpret that part of the man page had I no familiarity with ssh. It doesn’t seem reasonable to expect the reader to know what those brackets mean.
You get to learn the notation conventions with <> and [] fairly early on. Maybe a very new user would make that mistake. If he doesn’t get it fairly quick, maybe computers aren’t for him.
BS. I’ve been using linux for over 20 years and I still don’t know what those mean. I can only guess from context. It’s a stupid convention to just use symbols like that and never explain it.
Following the openbsd example from the original comment I replied to, it has absolutely nothing to say about what brackets mean, so this advice would not be helpful for an openbsd system: https://man.openbsd.org/man
On my personal linux system (arch derivative, by the way), it at least mentions brackets meaning optional, but only in the context of arguments:
[-abc] any or all arguments within [ ] are optional.
I think this would trip up some new users. The destination, with or without the username to connect as, may not seem like an “argument” to a new user since it doesn’t have a dash before it like the example does
ssh [admin@]192.168.1.1 ssh: Could not resolve hostname ]192.168.1.1: No address associated with hostnameThat’s how I would interpret that part of the man page had I no familiarity with ssh. It doesn’t seem reasonable to expect the reader to know what those brackets mean.
You get to learn the notation conventions with <> and [] fairly early on. Maybe a very new user would make that mistake. If he doesn’t get it fairly quick, maybe computers aren’t for him.
BS. I’ve been using linux for over 20 years and I still don’t know what those mean. I can only guess from context. It’s a stupid convention to just use symbols like that and never explain it.
Read the man manpage and all will be revealed.
Following the openbsd example from the original comment I replied to, it has absolutely nothing to say about what brackets mean, so this advice would not be helpful for an openbsd system: https://man.openbsd.org/man
On my personal linux system (arch derivative, by the way), it at least mentions brackets meaning optional, but only in the context of arguments:
I think this would trip up some new users. The destination, with or without the username to connect as, may not seem like an “argument” to a new user since it doesn’t have a dash before it like the example does