Hello Eric,
The terms "single-byte character" and "single-byte
printable character" do not sound precise to me.
A byte is just a byte. It is NOT a character.
I.e., it is an octet, or an 8-bit quantity.
It CAN be interpreted as a character, but only in
the context of a particular ENCODING.
The help text as it stands now IS precise in talking
about ASCII, which IS a particular encoding.
Please don't use the term "single-byte ... character"
without being precise about what encoding it uses.
Regards,
--Mark JAEGER phone: 312-651-8329
Sustaining Engineering (formerly DDR)
Server Technologies, Oracle e-mail: [email protected]
On Fri, 22 Mar 2013, Eric Blake wrote:
Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2013 10:03:47 -0600
From: Eric Blake <[email protected]>
To: Pádraig Brady <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected], Marc Grondin <[email protected]>,
[email protected]
Subject: Re: bug#13947: bug report for core-utils command : OD
On 03/22/2013 09:45 AM, Pádraig Brady wrote:
Hopefully the attached clarifies things.
* src/od.c (usage): Mention any printable character is output,
Not just ASCII.
* doc/coreutils.texi (od invocation): Further clarify that only
single byte characters are output (due to the alignment requirement).
Reported in http://bugs.gnu.org/13947
Yes, this looks good to me. It could go in as-is, but see my question
below...
---
doc/coreutils.texi | 6 +++---
src/od.c | 4 ++--
2 files changed, 5 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)
@table @samp
@item a
named character, ignoring high-order bit
@item c
-ASCII character or backslash escape,
+printable single byte character or backslash escape,
Hmm, we output octal sequences without a backslash; should the info page
be any more verbose that it is one of: a single-byte printable
character, a C backslash escape, or an octal sequence? Or does that
just clutter things (seeing three octal digits, even without a
backslash, still makes it easy to determine that it can be used as an
escape sequence).
+++ b/src/od.c
@@ -339,7 +339,7 @@ suffixes may be . for octal and b for multiply by 512.\n\
Traditional format specifications may be intermixed; they accumulate:\n\
-a same as -t a, select named characters, ignoring high-order bit\n\
-b same as -t o1, select octal bytes\n\
- -c same as -t c, select ASCII characters or backslash escapes\n\
+ -c same as -t c, select printable characters or backslash escapes\n\
For the --help output, terse is good, so I don't see any improvements to
your change here.
--
Eric Blake eblake redhat com +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org
