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Re: Do have programs have poor documentation?



On Sun 01 Jan 2017 at 20:00:56 (-0500), Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Sunday 01 January 2017 14:46:30 Thomas Schmitt wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> >
> > Gene Heskett wrote:
> > > I cannot recall ever seeing a more complete information about
> > > anything I ever looked up, telling me something that wasn't in the
> > > man page.
> >
> > Compare
> >   man ls
> > and
> >   info ls
> >
> > The chapter of ls in coreutils.info is much longer than the man page.
> > It gives some background information for the options which are grouped
> > by * Which files are listed::
> >   * What information is listed::
> >   * Sorting the output::
> >   * Details about version sort::
> >   * General output formatting::
> >   * Formatting file timestamps::
> >   * Formatting the file names::
> 
> I believe that is all in my man page on ls, its quite lengthy here on 
> this wheezy system. If not, then its the exception that proves the rule.

Have you actually looked?

$ man ls | wc -l
223
$ info --output=/dev/stdout --subnodes ls | wc -l
853
$ 

Where in   man ls   does this information come, just to pick on one small
aspect that sometimes pops up on debian-user:

     Following the file mode bits is a single character that specifies
     whether an alternate access method such as an access control list
     applies to the file.  When the character following the file mode
     bits is a space, there is no alternate access method.  When it is
     a printing character, then there is such a method.

     GNU `ls' uses a `.' character to indicate a file with an SELinux
     security context, but no other alternate access method.

     A file with any other combination of alternate access methods is
     marked with a `+' character.

Cheers,
David.


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