Re: Inaccurate/incorrect description of the -b option in man ls(1)

[Eric Blake]

On 03/18/2010 02:34 AM, Jim Meyering wrote:
> address@hidden wrote:
>> In the manpage for ls(1), the description of the -b option says,
>> "print octal escapes for nongraphic characters"

> Note that the authoritative documentation for GNU ls is not the
> man page (which is merely the massaged output of ls --help)
> but rather the info doc, i.e., what you get when you run
> "info coreutils ls".  Its "Formatting the file names" section says this:
> 
>     `-b'
>     `--escape'
>     `--quoting-style=escape'
>          Quote nongraphic characters in file names using alphabetic and
>          octal backslash sequences like those used in C.
> 
> which is consistent with GNU ls's behavior.

How about a patch that shortens the --help output:

s/octal //

or maybe slightly longer, but still legible:

s/octal /c-style/

Either way, it's a one-liner that makes --help match reality.

-- 
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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