apropos and "whole words" requirement
Dan Jacobowitz <drow@false.org> wrote:
>On Mon, Aug 03, 1998 at 03:49:09AM -0400, Adam P. Harris wrote:
>> "James R. Van Zandt" <jrv@vanzandt.mv.com> writes:
>> > ...Unfortunately, the Debian apropos is broken IMHO - try "apropos
>> > archive" and note that you *don't* get either of the following:
>> >
>> > ar (1) - create, modify, and extract from archives.
>> > cpio (1) - copy files to and from archives
>>
>> Um, yes I do! What's wrong with your mandb ??
>>
>> <apharris@burrito:sbr> apropos -r archive | grep cpio
...
>His point was that apropos archive | grep cpio doesn't return cpio;
Precisely.
>I suspect that -r is just not-only-whole-words, and wonder why for a
>program like apropos it is not the default.
not-only-whole-words *is* the default for apropos on every other Unix
I have worked on. I consider the current default to be a bug, and if
I remember correctly my report was not the only such opinion in the
BTS. Apparently the man-db maintainer disagrees, though.
-r is actually for regular expressions, but it has the side effect of
eliminating the whole-words requirement.
- Jim Van Zandt
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