evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch) (06/19/89)
I've always semi-understood the layout of Unix man pages. But going through
some of the sources I've installed, I've seen some ambiguous (to me)
arrangements that will cause confusion under the present scheme.
Specifically, I'm talking about the fact that some source distributions
describe their executables under section 1 (elm, compress, cnews, conf,
kermit, etc...). Yet others choose to put similar information in section 8
(Bnews, smail) and a straggler or two likes yet something else such as
cookie(6).
Frustrating my obvious workaround (just mixing sections 1 and 8) is the
odd file-format description in section 8 (aliases, paths, etc.).
Using 'man' online is no problem. But for printed pages I'm
tempted to just forget sections and sort them all alphabetically.
Is there a right or wrong to all this?
--
Evan Leibovitch, SA, Telly Online, located in beautiful Brampton, Ontario
evan@telly.on.ca / {uunet!attcan,utzoo}!telly!evan / (416) 452-0504
Computer salesman's credo: There's an end-user born every minutehenry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (06/20/89)
In article <1989Jun19.021419.1512@telly.on.ca> evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch) writes: >Specifically, I'm talking about the fact that some source distributions >describe their executables under section 1 (elm, compress, cnews, conf, >kermit, etc...). Yet others choose to put similar information in section 8 >(Bnews, smail) and a straggler or two likes yet something else such as >cookie(6). Historically, 1 was for commands that users might run, 6 was for games, 8 was for administration. The boundaries here were kind of fuzzy -- what about programs that users might run for administrative purposes? C News puts programs never intended to be run by humans (daemons and such) in 8, and human-run programs in 1. -- You *can* understand sendmail, | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology but it's not worth it. -Collyer| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu