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>Nobody who has ever used Bash has read the whole manual.

Bold claim and patently untrue because I have read the whole manual.

However:

1) Things you don't use often leak out of your brain at a rate that is absurd.

2) Different versions have different features and there's wide variations between versions on different platforms, you can't actually depend on a lot of bash stuff existing, so instead it's usually better to target POSIX sh

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I, too, experience Swiss-cheese-brain.

I once thought I’d solve this by taking notes, organizing a journal, and writing ... Well, it was a manual. That had the same problem as other manuals - too long, not gonna read.

Full circle.

I like making flashcards for myself for new topics that I study, in addition to notes. Of course bash as a whole will not fit on a flashcard, but breaking it into high-level topics. looking through the cards I’ve made helps when I feel the need to brush up on a topic in a general sense before diving deeper.

Despite all this, my brain is still Swiss-cheese.

Your note taking, organizing and writing will have helped you retain a lot more info for a longer period of time. It wasn't wasted effort. Still, there is a such thing as "too much". Higher degrees of success are achieved by regularly evaluating where you are in the "too little" to "too much" spectrum.

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