Hello Keith, On 02/16/2016 11:52 PM, Keith Thompson wrote: > A number of man pages refer to char* arguments as "strings" rather than as > "pointers to strings". > > For example, here's an excerpt from man3/strcmp.3: > > The strcmp() function compares the two strings s1 and s2. It returns > an integer less than, equal to, or greater than zero if s1 is found, > respectively, to be less than, to match, or be greater than s2. > > Compare the wording in the ISO C standard: > > The strcmp function compares the string pointed to by s1 to the string > pointed to by s2. > ... > The strcmp function returns an integer greater than, equal to, > or less than zero, accordingly as the string pointed to by s1 is > greater than, equal to, or less than the string pointed to by s2. > > The Solaris strcmp(3) man page also correctly refers to the arguments > as pointers to strings. > > There is a widespread misconception that a char* pointer value > is itself a string, rather than a pointer to a string. Is there? Maybe I'm too used to it. But something that declared as "type *" seems obviously to me to be a pointer. > See the > definitions in the C standard draft, N1570 7.1.1 paragraph 1, > http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1570.pdf : > > A *string* is a contiguous sequence of characters terminated by and > including the first null character. [...] A *pointer to a string* > is a pointer to its initial (lowest addressed) character. > > I haven't checked, but it's likely that there are man pages other than > the str*.3 pages that have this problem. However, I note that man3/fopen.3 > correctly refers to "the string pointed to by path". > > I'd like to volunteer to produce a patch that correctly refers to these > pointers as pointers rather than as strings -- but it would take a > while, and I don't want to spend the time if the patch is unlikely to > be accepted. > > What say you? I suppose that I myself have been guilty of writing such faulty text as you describe, possibly because it seems obvious to me that "char *" is a pointer. I'm not so sure this is a big problem, but I certainly wouldn't reject patches of this sort, especially for the more obvious cases such as described above. And thanks for volunteering to look at this. I suggest you start by writing one or two patches and sending them in, rather than creating a long series at the outset. Then we can early on determine how far we want to go with this. Thanks, Michael -- Michael Kerrisk Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/ -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-man" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
