On 11/02/2011 10:40 AM, abdallah clark wrote: > Dear Sirs and Ladies: > > I am taking a course in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and have met with > some difficulty interpreting the following statement in the man pages > for several commands: > > SIZE may be (or may be an integer optionally followed by) one of > following: KB 1000, K 1024, MB 1000*1000, M 1024*1024, and so on > for G, T, P, E, Z, Y. > > This is troublesome for several reasons. One, it is just too awkwardly > written to be understood on the first reading.
That's fairly clear to me. It's trying to convey that SIZE may be in the following forms: 1000 1KB KB How about: SIZE may be an integer, a unit, or both, with the units being: KB 1000, K 1024, MB 1000*1000, M 1024*1024, and so on for G, T, P, E, Z, Y. Not much better really. > Second, the units are not > consistent with the ISO/SI units-- K and M are in units of 1000, not > 1024, because they are part of the metric system, not the binary > system. Well we can't make that change for backwards compat reasons. > There are other concerns as well, but if you could clarify the > statement itself, they should be eliminated. > > Also, the statement "Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory > for short options too." puzzles me, as I'm not sure what long or short > options are, nor whether they apply to <ls> and <du>. --long -s -h -o -r -t > I'm not sure if your definition of "bug" includes errors in the man > pages, but I do hope so. Yes it does. Though generally documentation complaints should come with suggested improvements. cheers, Pádraig.
