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Re: apropos and "whole words" requirement



Sorry for late reading, but I'm out of linux boxes until weekends
(gnahh)


On Wed, Aug 12, 1998 at 09:23:06PM -0400, James R. Van Zandt wrote:
> 
> 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.

It's not that I disagree, (I don't remember if I replyed to your
report), but it's that I have contraddictorial bugs opened about this.
I don't know why mandb author chooses to do in this way, and the
presence of the -r option reveals it was done in such way by purpose,
and I don't know how apropose works in other Linux distributions.
I will check it in the future.

Anyway, my personal opinion is that apropos, by default, should search
only in the "left part", in the namepages space, in
"not-only-whole-words" mode, and it should need a special option to
search within the description.
But this way it would be different from other unices...

> >> > ar (1)               - create, modify, and extract from archives.
> >> > cpio (1)             - copy files to and from archives

cheers,
fab
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