According to man2/lseek.2,
This document's use of whence is incorrect English, but maintained for
historical reasons.
What is the grammatical objection?
>From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]:
whence
adv 1: from what place, source, or cause
Wiktionary:
[edit] Adverb
whence (not comparable)
1. From where; from which place or source.
lseek's second parameter is a distance to be traveled, and the third
parameter chooses the starting point from which that distance is measured.
How is that not a "whence"?
Looking at some man page archives, I found that the accusation of incorrect
English goes back to before 4.4BSD. It survives not just in the
linux-man-pages but also in recent versions of {Net,Open,Free}BSD. The name
"whence" for this parameter goes back at least to V7.
Of all the people who have read this page over the years, am I the only one
wondering... what's this about? Who decided that "whence" was incorrect and
put that note in the man page? Was there ever anything wrong, or do we have
someone's 20-year-old unresearched pet peeve lingering in the man pages?
--
Alan Curry
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