Hi Micheal, A conversation on #debconf-team this morning which mentioned the use of sort -R revealed that people that have been bitten by the quirks of sort -R have a folkloric understanding that there's something not quite right about it compared with what they want, but that even people that understand that are not necessarily aware of shuf.
Since shuf does the thing that people are most often wanting, how about just adding a note to the -R option to say something like: you probably want shuf(1) instead As a data point, I've been aware that GNU commands are documented in info for over two decades, but having uselessly invoked info only to be looking at a strangely formatted version of the man page again (because the real info has been kicked into non-free due to GFDL problems) I don't think it would occur to me to consult the info if looking at the sort man page. Even if I did, I might well miss the importance of the note reference to shuf. Given that there is not even a mention of info in the man page, the fact that the documentation in info is better than in man seems to be a poor reason not improve the documentation that most people consult. Cheers, Phil. -- |)| Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560] HANDS.COM Ltd. |-| http://www.hands.com/ http://ftp.uk.debian.org/ |(| Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34, 21075 Hamburg, GERMANY
