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Confusing description in extracting the archive (linux)

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Assessment

Difficulty
1/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
linux, shell
Domain
cli, documentation

Research direction

Locate the Linux installation instructions containing exercism-linux-64bit.tgz and the mv exercism ~/bin/exercism command, then follow the extraction paths described in the issue. Done means the expected working directory and source path are explicit, and the documented command cannot place the binary at ~/bin/exercism/exercism.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

The current instructions tell you to either use a context menu or the CLI to extract the downloaded archive:

  • If you’re using a graphic interface (e.g., GNOME or Unity on Ubuntu): go to your downloads directory, right click on the downloaded file and select Extract Here.
  • If you’re using the command line (use the right archive file name for your architecture):
    tar -xf exercism-linux-64bit.tgz
    

On the following page then mv exercism ~/bin/exercism is done without specifying from where.

Often users run that command from the ~/Download folder, while some graphical systems will create an extra folder exercism during unpacking.

This often leads to users ending up having the exercism binary in ~/bin/exercism/exercism and therefore ~/bin/exercism will fail with "is a directory".

I suggest to either exactly specify where the user is expected to be when copying the binary to the designated location, or to strictly remove the references to the GUI and even download through wget/curl.

Dominant language
Ruby
Stars
13
Forks
24
Avg merge
17m
Merged PRs (30d)
1

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