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.

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 (regardless if they are professionals, and their question relates to their work). If there is community consensus that this is the purpose of SF, then the faq could be find tuned a bit to make this more clear.

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).

References:

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