Are these things always clear to everyone else? I completely just come to a screeching halt with this type of thing. Are there brackets? are there quotes? Everyone writes these fill in the __________ type commands differently - and half the time I interpret them incorrectly. (or it's misleading / however you want to think about it)

I dont have a lot od problems with these. Usually anything in [ ] means its optional, so in this case Id asume I can leave the password and other params blank. The = makes sure that an empty string is possible without quotes or anything special. If you see parameters with = you can assume the code splits the param by = once and the rest is the value, if theres no = sign you have to assume the next param is going to be read as value instead

If theres [ ] you should assume its completely optional and you can leave that empty, consider this user creation from postgres database

CREATE USER name [ [ WITH ] option [ ... ] ]

What you really need to provide is only the create user and name part. Afterwards you *may* write "with" if you are providing any "options" at all. This is usually the notation CLI documentations follow and you should assume so

Ofc everyone that doesn't follow those conventions when writting documentations should take their one-way ticket to a special place on hell

assume no brackets or parenthesis, then move to parenthesis, then brackets, then...

makes it easier on yourself if you just start with the most logical and end with the least logical.