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bug#22042: don't say K bytes on both head and tail's man pages


From: Bernhard Voelker
Subject: bug#22042: don't say K bytes on both head and tail's man pages
Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2015 00:35:55 +0100
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.3.0

On 11/29/2015 12:16 AM, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> I remember having slight reservations about K too.
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2009-05/msg00279.html
> Nothing much better comes to mind.

Thanks.
In that discussion, also longer alternatives like COUNT or CNT were
mentioned.  If we decide to go that way, I'd favor NUM among those
suggestions, as it may also be used as is in translations.

While at it, I'm wondering if it would make sense to emphasize
the optional plus ('+') for tail in the first column, similar as
for the minus ('-') for head (although only for 'man head', but
not in the Texi documentation):

  $ src/head --help | grep -A2 -- '^[ ]*-[cn]'
    -c, --bytes=[-]K         print the first K bytes of each file;
                               with the leading '-', print all but the last
                               K bytes of each file
    -n, --lines=[-]K         print the first K lines instead of the first 10;
                               with the leading '-', print all but the last
                               K lines of each file

  $ src/tail --help | grep -A1 -- '^[ ]*-[cn]'
    -c, --bytes=K            output the last K bytes; or use -c +K to output
                               bytes starting with the Kth of each file
  --
    -n, --lines=K            output the last K lines, instead of the last 10;
                               or use -n +K to output starting with the Kth

Is there some GNU standard for this?  I couldn't find much.

Have a nice day,
Berny





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