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][1] 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][2], 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][3]
* 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][4] (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][5]
* [editing-not-so-good-questions][6]


  [1]: http://serverfault.com/questions/301293/what-is-the-canonical-portable-means-of-determining-only-the-ip-of-an-interface
  [2]: http://how-can-i-display-the-ip-address-of-an-interface
  [3]: http://serverfault.com/faq
  [4]: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/gorilla-vs-shark/
  [5]: http://meta.serverfault.com/questions/842/why-downvote-a-question-or-answer-on-server-fault
  [6]: http://meta.serverfault.com/questions/501/editing-not-so-good-questions