Date: Fri, 24 Sep 1999 12:51:01 -0700 (PDT) From: "Rodney W. Grimes" <freebsd@gndrsh.dnsmgr.net> To: pir@pir.net (Peter Radcliffe) Cc: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: man displays pages twice! Message-ID: <199909241951.MAA03907@gndrsh.dnsmgr.net> In-Reply-To: <19990924153104.E25080@pir.net> from Peter Radcliffe at "Sep 24, 1999 03:31:05 pm"
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> "Rodney W. Grimes" <freebsd@gndrsh.dnsmgr.net> probably said:
> > Hummm... hey mpp, is this the functionality that we talked about
> > that Berkeley man had in that it would show you all sections of
> > the manual that had a page by the same name gone haywire in GNU's
> > version of man???
>
> > This may be a bugger up of the proper man behavior that works in
> > the Berkeley man command that was retired to the attic many years
> > ago in that if the arg to man exists in more than one section of
> > the man pages it is suppose to display all the so named man pages.
> >
> > An example is ``man man'' which _should_ show you man1/man and
> > man7/man, but only shows you man1/man. I'll bet 90% of users
> > don't even know that man7/man exists... due to this bug...
>
> Thats what `man -k man` and `man 7 man` are for. Personally I'd much
> rather it display one page and indeed this is the documented default
> behaviour;
>
> -a By default, man will exit after displaying the first manual
> page it finds. Using this option forces man to display all
> the manual pages that match name, not just the first.
Blech... going all the way back to SunOS 3.5 man(1) based on the Berkeley
code didn't need this. Documented default behavior has changed.. wonder
if someone didn't know that man blah already did the right thing... sigh..
Also Berkely and GNU disagree on what -a does slightly:
-a Display all of the manual pages for a specified section and name
combination. (Normally, only the first manual page found is dis-
played.)
Note the more explicit ``section and name combination''. What does gnu
man -a 1 man produce? Okay, it works correctly but the above implies
that the section is ignored by not mentioning it.
--
Rod Grimes - KD7CAX - (RWG25) rgrimes@gndrsh.dnsmgr.net
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