On 11/02/11 03:40, abdallah clark wrote: > the units are not > consistent with the ISO/SI units-- K and M are in units of 1000, not > 1024, because they are part of the metric system, not the binary > system.
coreutils is supporting three notations here: SI-ish, IEC 60027-2 / ISO/IEC 80000-13:2008, and traditional Unix. So: MB means 1000*1000 bytes. This is like SI, except SI doesn't have "B". MiB means 1024*1024 bytes. This is IEC 60027-2 and ISO/IEC 80000-13:2008. M means MiB. This is traditional Unix. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix> for more info. (coreutils cannot use plain SI, since SI doesn't specify an abbreviation for "byte".) > it is just too awkwardly > written to be understood on the first reading. Suggestions for improved wording are welcome. We'd like it to be short, of course. > Also, the statement "Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory > for short options too." puzzles me Yes, I don't like that sentence either. Suggestions for improvement are welcome here, too. Maybe we should just get rid of it? I expect it causes more confusion than it cures.
