[debbugs-tracker] bug#37604: closed (man page description of -i confused someone)

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Your message dated Thu, 3 Oct 2019 15:25:30 -0700
with message-id <address@hidden>
and subject line Re: bug#37604: man page description of -i confused someone
has caused the debbugs.gnu.org bug report #37604,
regarding man page description of -i confused someone
to be marked as done.

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37604: http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=37604
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--- Begin Message --- Subject: man page description of -i confused someone Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2019 09:08:59 -0400

There's an interesting question about grep posted on StackOverflow.com:

       https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45717127

The user was confused why "-i" didn't apply to the NAMES of the files on the command line.  Obviously this is a misunderstanding of the separation of duties between the shell and the commands (shell expands wildcards, not the command).  The top ranked answer for the question gently explained the difference.

That said, I do take pity on the person, who may have been an early beginner or possibly not a native English speaker.  The man page says:

       -i, --ignore-case

              Ignore case distinctions in both the PATTERN and the input

              files.

Taking off my developer hat and putting on my writer/author hat, I have to agree that the man page could be phrased better.  I think the person got caught up by seeing the word "files" instead of "contents". (I could also make the case that the fact that stdin isn't really a file means the sentence is inaccurate.)

My suggestion is to change the description to be:

   Ignore case distinctions in both the PATTERN and the contents being searched.

even better would be to break it into multiple sentences. This would make it perfectly clear:

   Ignore case during the search. Case is ignored in both the input contents PATTERN and the contents being searched.

Tom

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--- End Message ---

--- Begin Message --- Subject: Re: bug#37604: man page description of -i confused someone Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2019 15:25:30 -0700 User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.1.0 Thanks for the bug report. I installed the attached, which should make things clearer, albeit a bit more tersely than you suggested.

0001-grep-tighten-i-doc.patch
Description: Text Data

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