First off, I'm not trying to start a pity party for myself, nor am I trying to be overly pedantic - please don't write off my comments as such. Also, to those who responded to the question, I'm trying to be constructive, not critical of your responses.

My question what-is-the-canonical-portable-means-of-determining-only-the-ip-of-an-interface from yesterday, on looking up server ip addresses, wasn't well received (fine, everyone is welcome to their opinion). I realize that my question is very similar to how-can-i-display-the-ip-address-of-an-interface, and that I could have phrased my question differently.

My point is that I asked the question because:

• I was unsatisfied with the solutions I had available (which I did reference)
• I believed that it met the criteria in the faq
• It seemed like there should be a 'better way'
• This is a common task (for me at least), and a good answer should be useful to others

As it turns out, there doesn't seem to be a good solution (i.e. "why do i need to sort though all this terminal output just to get an ip?").

The response that I think would have been more constructive would have been to say:

1. There isn't a good way to do what you're asking
2. Reasons: x, y, z

I would have been happy to accept and upvote that answer.

I also disagree with the closed as "Not Constructive", as I don't think my question met the criteria in the close dialog, or from Gorilla vs. Shark (although "Exact Duplicate" is probably called for).

TLDR:

I tried to ask a good question and be specific about what I wanted to know. Part of asking questions is that you might ask the wrong question, or a bad question. Bad questions can be handled well with a brief explanation, but it's inevitable that people (like myself) will arrive misinformed. If in that situation, questions are met with disdain, SE will not cater to anyone but experts.

References:

• why-downvote-a-question-or-answer-on-server-fault
• editing-not-so-good-questions