> From: Michael Convey <[email protected]> > Date: Fri, 31 Jul 2015 14:22:26 -0700 > Cc: Gavin Smith <[email protected]>, [email protected] > > On Fri, Jul 31, 2015 at 2:12 PM, Eli Zaretskii <[email protected]> wrote: > > > From: Michael Convey <[email protected]> > > Date: Fri, 31 Jul 2015 11:59:43 -0700 > > Cc: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> > > > > $ info -- apropos > > \'\-\-\' > > info: No available info files have ''--'' in their indices. > > Why in the world would you want to look for that? What stuff did you > _really_ want to find? > > I was trying to determine how universal '--' is for delimiting the option > list.
How would you determine this using the results of the search? I think you expected to see a literal '--' in a manual, but (a) many if not most manuals nowadays use Unicode quoting as in ‘--’, and (b) I never saw this literally shown as an option, instead you'd see something like this: [...] As with most programs, the special argument ‘--’ says that all subsequent arguments are file names, not options, even if they start with ‘-’. (The above is from the Emacs manual.) Therefore, the following commands info --apropos "command line" info --apropos "invoking" are IMO a more efficient way of finding the information you were looking for, because you need to see the surrounding context, not just a single line, to understand what does the manual say. In any case, I don't object to having a literal text search option in Info, I just think that the use cases which justify it are few and far in-between, and quite a few of those that people think of are better served by the --apropos searches in indices.
