Hi Branden,
On 5/23/21 11:04 PM, Alejandro Colomar (man-pages) wrote:
> On 5/23/21 10:53 PM, Alejandro Colomar (man-pages) wrote:
>>> The use of a dash/minus as a separator "feels" unorthodox to me, but
>>> perhaps that is just the pull of blind tradition. I think it's actually
>>> a better choice than an underscore because of course "-" is not valid in
>>> a C identifier, and "_" is, so ambiguity is avoided.
>>
>> I used struct-foo because man has the ability to allow either
>> 'man struct-foo' or 'man struct foo', and the latter looks very
>> intuitive from a C-syntax perspective (I learnt this from the git manual
>> pages, where you can do 'man git log' or 'man git-log'). 'man man'
>> doesn't specify this behavior, so I'll read the source code and try to
>> confirm how it works.
>
> I would need some time to understand the code, but perhaps it's around
> lines 1303 or 1396
>
> .../man-db$ grep -rn "'-'" src/man.c;
> 1013: if (dbfilters && (dbfilters[0] != '-') && !preprocessors) {
> 1303: case '-':
> 1396: if (*pp_string == ' ' || *pp_string == '-')
> 2921: if (*source->pointer != '-')
> 3222: if (*in->pointer != '-')
> .../man-db$ grep -rn "' '" src/man.c;
> 797: case ' ':
> 810: if (*(manopt + 1) == ' ')
> 1302: case ' ':
> 1396: if (*pp_string == ' ' || *pp_string == '-')
> 2415: putchar (' ');
> 4051: } else if (cmd[i] == '\t' || cmd[i] == ' ' || cmd[i] ==
> '\n' ||
> $
A few weeks ago I found out that '_' can also be replaced by a space in
man. i.e., `man foo_struct` and `man foo struct` would be equivalent.
However, as you pointed out, I think it's better to use '_' to avoid
using valid C identifiers.
Kind regards,
Alex
--
Alejandro Colomar
Linux man-pages comaintainer; https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/
