What You Know You Know, What You Don't Know, and What You Don't Know That You Don't Know

Blogs are a great way to show what you know and also a great way to show what you don't know (and can learn). I blogged yesterday about how to chain 2 ant calls together via Bash. Several comments showed that there is definitely more than one way to do this. You can use the "&&" in Windows to chain commands (which I had seen in the past and promptly forgotten). This also works in Cygwin's Bash because most of the stuff that works in the Windows command prompt also works there (Reason #432 to use Bash). However, I didn't know that you can chain targets together on the command line for Ant! I've been using Ant since early 2001 (I know the time frame because I wrote the first Ant article for Java Developer's Journal in June of 2001), but I didn't know about this handy-dandy little trick.

This illustrates, to me, one of the best reasons to have a public forum like a blog. You inadvertently learn all sorts of stuff if you are brave enough to try to teach others what you already know -- including stuff that you didn't know that you didn't know.