man page prompter thinks "|" is legitimate

man page prompter thinks "|" is legitimate

[Dan Jacobson]

Gentlemen, type s o r t | u n i q <escape> x m a n <return>
We are then prompted with
        Manual entry (default sort|uniq):
Why, that's ridiculous.  How could a potential man page have a | in
its name?  Can't the prompter be more intelligent in guessing what man
page we want?
-- 
http://jidanni.org/ Taiwan(04)25854780

Re: man page prompter thinks "|" is legitimate

[David R. Linn]

>> Gentlemen, type s o r t | u n i q <escape> x m a n <return>
>> We are then prompted with
>>         Manual entry (default sort|uniq):
>> Why, that's ridiculous.  How could a potential man page have a | in
>> its name?  Can't the prompter be more intelligent in guessing what man
>> page we want?


$$ mkdir demo.for.dan
$$ cd demo.for.dan
$$ touch filename\|including\|vbars
$$ ls
filename|including|vbars
$$ touch sort\|uniq.1
$$ ls
filename|including|vbars  sort|uniq.1


vertical-bar *is* a legitmate filename character under UNIX.  Thus,
if I felt it was appropriate, I could name a man page with a vbar
in it's filename.  This might not be particularly *wise* but it *would*
be legit so tools need to handle it.

Re: man page prompter thinks "|" is legitimate

[Dan Jacobson]

D> vertical-bar *is* a legitmate filename character under UNIX.  Thus,
D> if I felt it was appropriate, I could name a man page with a vbar
D> in it's filename.  This might not be particularly *wise* but it
D> *would* be legit so tools need to handle it.

Yes, vertical bar might even be a legitimate character in an English
given name (Hello, I'm Monty [vertical bar] Python) however, all this
will slow up my lifestyle, and RMS agrees with me, so there.

From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
Subject: Re: man page prompter thinks "|" is legitimate
To: jidanni@dman.ddts.net
How about this change?

*** man.el.~1.112.~	Tue Oct 15 18:21:41 2002
--- man.el	Wed Oct 16 11:36:04 2002
***************
*** 497,503 ****
      (save-excursion
        ;; Default man entry title is any word the cursor is on, or if
        ;; cursor not on a word, then nearest preceding word.
!       (setq word (current-word))
        (if (string-match "[._]+$" word)
  	  (setq word (substring word 0 (match-beginning 0))))
        ;; If looking at something like ioctl(2) or brc(1M), include the
--- 497,506 ----
      (save-excursion
        ;; Default man entry title is any word the cursor is on, or if
        ;; cursor not on a word, then nearest preceding word.
!       (skip-chars-backward "-a-zA-Z0-9._+")
!       (let ((start (point)))
! 	(skip-chars-forward "-a-zA-Z0-9._+")
! 	(setq word (buffer-substring start (point))))
        (if (string-match "[._]+$" word)
  	  (setq word (substring word 0 (match-beginning 0))))
        ;; If looking at something like ioctl(2) or brc(1M), include the

--------
P.S. how about those Perl::Pages with those ::'s jazz, did RMS's
change remember them [:: could be expected, but not |, because nobody
would put a | in a man page name and expect their jazz to not break
debian, redhat, etc. distribution scripts before even making it into a
distribution.]
-- 
http://jidanni.org/ Taiwan(04)25854780 

Re: man page prompter thinks "|" is legitimate

[Francesco Potorti`]

> >>         Manual entry (default sort|uniq):
> >> Why, that's ridiculous.  How could a potential man page have a | in
> $$ ls
> filename|including|vbars
> vertical-bar *is* a legitmate filename character under UNIX.  

If I am not wrong, all characters are legitimate in file names under
Unix, apart from the slash.  This does not mean that it is reasonable to
assume that all characters are likely to be found in man page names.

The `|' character should be removed, and the `:' character added.  The
latter is used in Perl man pages.