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From: | Marcel (Felix) Giannelia |
Subject: | Re: documentation bug re character range expressions |
Date: | Thu, 09 Jun 2011 12:40:33 -0700 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.17) Gecko/20110601 Thunderbird/3.1.10 |
On 09/06/11 11:31, Chet Ramey wrote:
[...] No, it doesn't. It's not part of any standard, and it's not part of pattern matching, so I implemented it with the traditional C semantics because that seemed the most straightforward.
Pity the implementor of character range expressions didn't have the same thought ;)
I realize it's pedantic, but documentation should be pedantically accurate :) I would be OK with changing the man page so it says, "sorts between those two characters in a list of single-character strings", as that would also describe the current behaviour.But it only matches a single character, by definition. It should not be necessary to specify the list of single-character strings part.
I guess that's true. It's still confusing, though -- it would make more sense to me if it simply went by sort weights and thus considered 'c' and 'C' equivalent... but I guess then you'd get people asking "how come [a] is case-sensitive and [a-z] isn't?". Then again, we've already got people asking that -- I guess range expressions are just tricky no matter how you look at them.
[...] The bash texinfo documentation says just about the same thing.
There's an 'info bash'?! Oh, so there is. OK, then I revise my suggested revision to the man page -- it's missing a mention of the info manual under the SEE ALSO section. (Most other commands that have an info manual have something like "The full documentation for ls is maintained as a Texinfo manual. If the info and ls programs are properly installed [...]")
Guess it's time I really learned how to navigate texinfo... (Do I come across as old-fashioned nowadays for still using man?)
~Felix.
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