bug#22042: don't say K bytes on both head and tail's man pages

[Pádraig Brady]

On 28/11/15 23:02, Bernhard Voelker wrote:
> On 11/28/2015 09:45 PM, Bernhard Voelker wrote:
>> On 11/28/2015 09:01 PM, Dan Jacobson wrote:
>>> On both the head and tail man pages,
>>> can you kindly not use "K"?
>>>
>>>        -c, --bytes=K
>>>               output the last K bytes; or use -c +K to output  bytes  
>>> starting
>>>               with the Kth of each file
>>>
>>> K bytes sounds like kilobytes.
>>>
>>> Yes if one reads carefully it doesn't.
>>>
>>> But instead if you used X, then one needn't read carefully and could
>>> still read the page!
>>>
>>> Or how about B? B bytes. Sounds even better than X.
>>>
>>> Anyway it (K) appears several places on both man pages.
>>
>> Thanks.
>> Another good spot.
>> I'd rather use 'N' as many users would more likely see this as
>> 'N'umeric argument.  The following does that ... plus also switching
>> 2 other placeholders to avoid overlapping with the explanation regarding
>> the suffixes K, M, G, T, etc.
> 
> oops, Eric applied the opposite patch 6 years ago:
>   http://git.sv.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/commit/?id=v7.4-18-gc433334
> 
> The archives (http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/coreutils/) start 2010,
> so does anyone remember why K would be less ambigous than N?

The mailing list split around then:
I remember having slight reservations about K too.
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2009-05/msg00279.html
Nothing much better comes to mind.

cheers,
Pádraig