Verify the commands by looking them up in the docimentation. So if the advice is to run foo --bar afile first do man foo or foo --help and check what the command does and what option --bar does.

Good documentation, i esepicially like the gentoo docs and also the arch docs for this, will specifically say run this command where these options are added to do a thing.

Don’t run anything where you don’t know what it will do based on the docukentation, so not based on the surrounding text where you are copying froom saying trust me bro.

But of course this can end up being a lot of effort and is just a long way of saing rtfm.