Read The Flaming / Fucking Manual (Reference: telecommunication-slang, Usenet, IRC)

<jargon> /R T F M/ Read The Fucking Manual (always abbreviated, sometimes bowdlerised to "Fine" or "Friendly") An (unhelpful) guru's traditional response when someone asks a question in a newsgroup or mailing list which he could have easily answered for himself had he bothered to RTFM. The term may also be used to indicate that you couldn't find the answer in the manual. E.g. "How do I interface Unix to my toaster? And yes, I did RTFM but the FM didn't help and I can't RTFS." Other derived forms include RTFAQ, RTFB, RTM, and, more recently, STFW. Compare: UTSL. [Earliest use?] [Jargon File] (2003-06-07)

RTFM is an initialism and internet slang for the expression "read the fucking manual" – typically used to reply to a basic question where the answer is easily found in the documentation, user guide, owner's manual, man page, online help, internet forum, software documentation or FAQ.

(Unix) Read The Bloody Manual. Commonwealth Hackish variant of RTFM. RTBM is often the entire text of the first reply to a question from a newbie; the *second* would escalate to "RTFM". [Jargon File] (1994-12-08)

Real Time Bit Mapping

<jargon> 1. Read The Fucking Source. Variant form of RTFM, used when the problem at hand is not necessarily obvious and not answerable from the manuals - or the manuals are not yet written and maybe never will be. For even trickier situations, see RTFB. Unlike RTFM, the anger inherent in RTFS is not usually directed at the person asking the question, but rather at the people who failed to provide adequate documentation. 2. Read The Fucking Standard; this oath can only be used when the problem area (e.g. a language or operating system interface) has actually been codified in a ratified standards document. The existence of these standards documents (and the technically inappropriate but politically mandated compromises that they inevitably contain, and the impenetrable legalese in which they are invariably written, and the unbelievably tedious bureaucratic process by which they are produced) can be unnerving to hackers, who are used to a certain amount of ambiguity in the specifications of the systems they use. (Hackers feel that such ambiguities are acceptable as long as the Right Thing to do is obvious to any thinking observer; sadly, this casual attitude toward specifications becomes unworkable when a system becomes popular in the Real World.) Since a hacker is likely to feel that a standards document is both unnecessary and technically deficient, the deprecation inherent in this term may be directed as much against the standard as against the person who ought to read it. [Jargon File]

<jargon> (By analogy with RTFM) Read The Fucking Binary. Used when neither documentation nor source for the problem at hand exists, and the only thing to do is use some debugger or monitor and directly analyse the assembler or even the machine code. "RTFB" is the least pejorative of the RTF? forms, the anger is directed at the absence of both source *and* adequate documentation rather than at the person asking a question. [Jargon File] (1995-08-20)

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