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bug#6175: dirname manpage and info page partially wrong/misleading


From: Filipus Klutiero
Subject: bug#6175: dirname manpage and info page partially wrong/misleading
Date: Tue, 11 May 2010 17:17:22 -0400
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100411 Icedove/3.0.4

This report is about 2 separate issues in the dirname documentation. The info page is much better than the manual page, but says:
`dirname' prints all but the final slash-delimited component of a
string (presumably a file name, but also works on directories).
The parenthese is wrong; there is no reason to presume the file given is a regular file, dirname is equally useful on directories. "presumably" should perhaps be replaced by "usually", or removed.

The manual page is much more confusing, saying:

DESCRIPTION


Print NAME with its trailing /component removed; if NAME contains no /'s, output `.' (meaning the current directory).

dirname is more complex than just removing a trailing slash followed by a pathname component if that is the ending. For example, it also removes a slash followed by a pathname component followed by a slash, if that is how the path terminates. The manual should probably adopt the info page's formulation, which is more vague, but not wrong.






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