ietf-nntp Merging ARTICLE, HEAD, BODY, and STAT
Clive D.W. Feather
clive at demon.net
Thu Jul 27 14:45:21 PDT 2000
Chin Chee-Kai said:
> I second this opinion in the presentation of the command
> specifications. If there's even a real need to illustrate
> some kind of similarity or relationship between the commands,
> most technical references I've seen place them under
> "See Also".
Where there's a vague relationship, this is true.
Where the commands are essentially identical with only small differences,
it is more usual to put them as a single description with a note of what
the differences are.
On this (FreeBSD) system, "man grep" gives me a single page describing
grep, egrep, fgrep, and zgrep. At one point it says:
In addition, two variant programs egrep and fgrep are
available. egrep is similar (but not identical) to
grep -E, and is compatible with the historical Unix egrep.
fgrep is the same as grep -F. zgrep is the same as
grep -Z.
and at another point:
In egrep the metacharacter { loses its special meaning;
instead use \{.
Apart from that, there is just the one common description. I would say that
these are rather more distinct than ARTICLE and friends.
Another example is the stat/fstat/lstat system calls.
--
Clive D.W. Feather | Work: <clive at demon.net> | Tel: +44 20 8371 1138
Internet Expert | Home: <clive at davros.org> | Fax: +44 20 8371 1037
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