Date: Mon, 13 Dec 1999 17:17:51 -0800 From: "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg@monkeys.com> To: chris@calldei.com Cc: freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: docs/14563: Wrong manpage produced by `man 4 fd' Message-ID: <11294.945134271@monkeys.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of Mon, 13 Dec 1999 18:48:20 -0600. <19991213184820.K868@holly.calldei.com>
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In message <19991213184820.K868@holly.calldei.com>, you wrote: >On Mon, Dec 13, 1999, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote: >> I agree completely, but `man 4 fd' *should* yield a man page that talks >> about floppy disk device files... *not* one that talks about UNIX file >> descriptors. (You can just trash the one that talks about file descrip- >> tors as far as I'm concerned. If people want to know about those, they >> should go buy a general book about UNIX/C programming.) > > Or it could be the other way: You could trash the man page >for the disk driver. If people want to know about those, they >can buy a Unix book or read the source code. > > It works both ways. No, it doesn't. The tradition... on SySV at least... not sure about *BSD... is that data structures that are ``basic'' and/or common to a whole group of libc routines and/or kernel calls are documented in intro(2) or intro(3). Man pages for kernel functions are in Section 2, man pages for ordinary libc functions are in Section 3, and device files have man pages in Section 4. A UNIX file descriptor is not a device type _or_ a device file. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message
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