Hi Jason, Jason McIntyre wrote on Fri, Sep 03, 2021 at 07:47:19AM +0100: > On Thu, Sep 02, 2021 at 11:10:54PM +0100, Jason McIntyre wrote:
>> i wonder if it was originally an attempt to not quote posix >> (or posix attempting to not quote bsd). posix refers to removing >> "directory entries", which seems more natural. Quite to the contrary. A wording "removes the entries" first appeared in AT&T System III UNIX (1980). I first see the specific wording "remove directory entries" in Version 10 AT&T UNIX in December 1989 and it was then also used by Cynthia Livingston on June 11, 1990 when she converted the page from man(7) to mdoc(7). So this predates POSIX.2 (1992). Not sure what XPG 3 said in 1989. The current wording of the .Nd and the first sentence of the DESCRIPTION was committed by Keith Bostic on August 12, 1990 with this commit message: new version of rm from scratch and the POSIX.2 description I'm surprised that Keith referred to POSIX.2 in 1990 even though the original POSIX.2 is usually quoted as "IEEE Std 1003.2-1992". I know that POSIX.2 drafts were being worked on in 1991, but apparently some were already in circulation in the summer of 1990. > on the other hand, the phrase "non-directory type files" is pretty > awful. posix is clearer i think, sticking to "directory entries > specified by each file argument".we could also use this: "directory > entries specified on the command line". but that would feel like > deliberately avoiding the term "file", which is clear and simple. > > just using "non-directory files" is also weird. i mean, you can very > much remove directory files. It is standard practice that the first paragraph of the DESCRIPTION describes default behaviour, then the option list describes modifications of this behaviour, in this case that -d and -r also remove directories. So regarding the content, there is nothing to fix. If you think the wording is awful, you could say The rm utility attempts to remove the files specified on the command line. By default, specifying a directory is an error. If the permissions ... or something similar. Since this is about wording, i would say it is your call. In any case, i agree with Theo that the .Nd should not be changed. Yours, Ingo
