Re: [screen-devel] description of -S and -p semantics in man page seems wrong

[Britton Kerin]

On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 6:11 PM, Chris Jones <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 05:47:52PM EDT, Britton Kerin wrote:
>
> [..]
>
>> You seem to be correct.  The -S man page documentation still needs
>> a fix though.  It begins "When creating a new session,... " which is
>> very misleading.  I notice that the Screen User's Manual has this:
>
>> ‘-S sessionname’
>>     Set the name of the new session to sessionname. This option can be used
>>     to specify a meaningful name for the session in place of the default
>>     tty.host suffix. This name identifies the session for the screen -list
>>     and screen -r commands. This option is equivalent to the sessionname
>>     command (see Session Name).
>
>> Which is different text but wrong in the same way.  The -S option has
>> semantic significance that has nothing to do with the creation of new
>> sessions. It applies in that case but also in others.
>>
>> I just spent some time trying to figure out how to get a list of all
>> the windows in a session, to be sure and send the commant to the
>> correct one. But I couldn't figure it out.  I'm using the 'screen
>> /serial/port/dev' form of the screen command, which doesn't seem to
>> support the n argument that lets you specify the window number
>> explicitly.  'screen -list' says it lists sessions, and indeed its
>> output doesn't seem to show window numbers. I think a general cleanup
>> of the description of the options controlling and specifying sessions
>> and windows would be worthwhile.
>
> As a long-time user, it doesn't strike me as inconsistant.. perhaps not
> as clear as it should be. But then I'm probably so used to that man
> page..
>
> Maybe you could send in a doc patch that suggests a clearer formulation
> to the maintainers and they'll take it from there..?

Unfortunately, I'm not sure what exactly -S does do, its just clear that it
applies in other situation besides new session creation.  If the maintainers
don't follow this list, I think the issue is not worth pursuing anymore and I'm
going to look at tmux.

Britton