Package: coreutils
Version: 5.97-5.3
Severity: normal
The 'touch' documentation (info manual, man page and 'touch --help'
output) needs to be clarified.
1. First, 'touch' follows symbolic links, and the documentation should
say that, because this is far from being clear (e.g. 'rm' and 'ls'
don't follow symbolic links). I suppose that this is the correct
behavior, though POSIX isn't clear either, as BSD 'touch' does the
same thing.
2. The info manual says in Section 13.4 (about 'touch'):
--------
Any FILE that does not exist is created empty.
A FILE of `-' causes `touch' to change the times of the file
associated with standard output.
--------
In the first sentence, 'FILE' refers to a file (after following
dereferencing symbolic links). In the second sentence, 'FILE'
refers to a string ('-' being different from './-' for instance).
I suggest saying something like:
An operand of `-' ...
or
A FILE string of `-' ...
-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.18-5-686-bigmem (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=POSIX, LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO8859-1 (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Versions of packages coreutils depends on:
ii libacl1 2.2.42-1 Access control list shared library
ii libc6 2.6.1-1 GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii libselinux1 2.0.15-2+b1 SELinux shared libraries
coreutils recommends no packages.
-- no debconf information
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
