Date: Wed, 21 May 2008 09:34:40 -0700
From: Eric Sultan <Eric.Sultan at sun.com>
Subject: Re: vmstat(1m) humanisation [PSARC/2008/329 FastTrack
timeout 05/16/2008]
AFAIK, IEEE standards use lower-case 'k' for kilo. This isn't, of
course, to say that folks haven't been ignoring the standard or
perhaps not have known it.
Within Sun, the Editorial Style Guide conforms to established
standards and specifies the use of lower-case 'k' for kilo.
Be that as it may, consistency with other Solaris utilities that
provide an option for requesting "humanized" output is more important.
Those utilites (or at least ls(1) and (df(1)) use upper case suffixes.
Examples to the contrary, including Linux and BSD versions of
utilities providing similar options, would be useful.
The principle of least surprise is important here. We want the syntax
we choose to be familiar to people who have seen similar options in
other utilities. If it turns out that there are discrepancies in this
respect between Solaris utilities and their Linux and/or BSD
counterparts, we'll have to judge what the least surprising choice is.
This principle is also important in deciding whether or not to
introduce additional suffixes to distinguish between "divide by 1024"
and "divide by 1000" units. A wider set of examples of whether other
utilities have made such distinctions would be helpful in making this
judgement.
-- Glenn
