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
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