sur-behoffski wrote:
>> Blending in documentation about -h immediately made me curious.

Speaking off the cuff, without benefit of looking at the code or sufficient 
experimenting with the behavior, I would expect that:

By default, if more than one file argument is named on the command line or is 
potentially implied by the "-r" recursive option, grep prefixes each line of 
output with the file name in which it was found, whereas if only one file is 
explicitly named, or only the standard input is being searched, then grep 
suppresses the prefixing of file names on output.  The "-h" and "-H" options 
override these defaults, to either never ("-h") or always ("-H") prefix each 
line of output with the file name in which it was found.  If "-H" is specified 
and grep is searching its standard input, that input file name prefix is the 
string "(standard input)".

Clearly my previous paragraph fails the "keep word count parsimonious" mandate 
for man pages.  Perhaps the two man page paragraphs, one for "-h" and the next 
one for "-H", could be combined into a single paragraph, derived from some 
parsimonious variant of my above paragraph, explaining both the "-h" and "-H" 
options.

-- 
Paul Jackson
jack...@fastmail.fm



Reply via email to