Re: Trying to understand man page for dd
On Mon 29 May 2017 at 06:59:23 (-0500), Richard Owlett wrote:
> I think the is a subtle bug in the man page.
> I introduces the two lines of code saying:
> > Sending a USR1 signal to a running 'dd' process makes it print
> > I/O statistics to standard error and then resume copying.
> I believe that to accurately describe the code at
>
> https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/dd-invocation.html#dd-invocation
> *NOT* the code on the man page.
The two lines you quote don't "introduce" anything. They describe
the action of dd when you send a USR1 signal to it, a primary
purpose of the man page.
> I realize now that was the discrepancy that prompted my question.
> I had gone to the man page to double check syntax. Spotted the code
> a thought "a way to display progress information when copying".
>
> I can "sort of" understand syntactically correct code. The less said
> of my programming skills the better ;/ How I "read" the code just
> didn't jibe with the description.
>
> Am I correct that there is a problem with the man page?
Not that I can see. A terse illustration of program output might
be seen as an infrequent but welcome addition to a man page.
However, others might prefer not to lengthen the man page (which
is a one chunk affair) with tutorials, or even examples,
preferring to leave that for info nodes or other more extensive
documentation.
Cheers,
David.
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