Re: Bug#501566: dash: details of redirection/duplication in manpage are reversed

[Stephen Shirley <diamond@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

On 10 November 2014 14:49, Stéphane Aulery <saulery@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> Le lundi 10 novembre 2014 à 09:24:09, Herbert Xu a écrit :
>> Stéphane Aulery <saulery@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>> >
>> > [1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=501566
>> >
>>
>> I'm sorry but this patch looks wrong and the text looks correct
>> to me as is.
>
> Ok. I passed the information but I'm not really able to judge its
> pertinence. In this case I close this bug.

So, i finally managed to figure out what the problem is. The wording
is ambiguous (or maybe just insufficiently clear).

"[n1]>&n2    Duplicate standard output (or n1) to n2."

How i read it (6 years ago :P) was that meant dup2(n1, n2), because
the only actual /duplication/ is of file descriptors. I've just
realised that the intended meaning is "redirect n1 to where n2 is
currently", i.e. dup2(n2, n1), as expected. Can i suggest a simple
fix:

"[n1]>&n2    Redirect standard output (or n1) to n2."

It doesn't cover the case where n2 is later changed, and how n1 does
not follow this, but it's the simplest fix i see.

Steve
-- 
"You are technically correct, the best kind of correct."
- Bureaucrat 1.0, Futurama
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