Can't mark as duplicate to other Stack Exchange Question

Question

I wanted to provide an answer but also indicate that this question variables in crontab was a duplicate an existing question, and provide a link to the answer that I thought was best. ie This one, https://stackoverflow.com/a/10657111/1515570

What I find particularily irritating, are two things.

1. My answer was short and to the point, so it was interpreted as too short and was immediately converted to a comment. I would have prefered it gave me a chance to expand on my answer, so that I wouldn't have to remove the comment and expand on it!
2. I couldn't flag the questions, and provide, the Stack Overflow question as an answer, because it belongs to another site on stack exchange. Even though, in my opinion it was a very good answer and had received 55 votes.

How should I handle these situations? I tend to give up and shrug my shoulders ?

Answer 1

I think you're misunderstanding what a duplicate is. A duplicate is only within a single SE site, such as Unix & Linux. Duplicates do not span different SE sites.

The normal course of action should be to copy the answer from the other SE site, put it in our own words as much as you can and customize it so that it's appropriate for the question on U&L, and then provide a link to the source material (the other SE Q&A).

It may seem like plagiarism or wasteful to do this, but each SE site is their own "island" and is attempting to collect the optimal solutions to questions & problems that are on topic for that SE site's charter.

This site's charter is to collect Q&A's that are related to Unix and Linux. Collect in the sense that it have local copies of these Q&A's not merely point to existing resources that are already on the internet that might answer them, even when those resources are other SE sites.