bug#13216: head(1) man page not talking about kilobytes

[Bob Proulx]

Alan Curry wrote:
> To summarize, a single-letter name was found to be confusing, so you change
> it to another single-letter name because surely that'll not be confusing and
> because you like the look of Kth as a replacement for Nth. Bleargh.

I can't really disagree.  But there were objections to using a word
there instead of a letter.

> The clearest documentation for GNU coreutils is found in the man pages of
> your friendly neighborhood BSD box. (You don't need the non-portable long
> options anyway.)

That isn't quite fair because the BSD head only has two options.  Both
of them short single letter options.  There are no long options to
document.  There are no options for -q,--quiet, -v,--verbose, --help
or --version to document.  And so almost the entirety of the man
page[1] boils down to one line:

   head [-n count | -c bytes] [file ...]

Also the BSD version doesn't support any of the nice multipliers such
as b, kB, K, MB, M, GB, G, T, P, E, Z, Y and so those can't be
confused there.

Creeping featurism!  Now you know why I am a status quo person.

Bob

[1] 
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=head&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+9.0-RELEASE&arch=default&format=html