On Tue, Aug 13, 2019 at 07:47:52AM -0400, rhkra...@gmail.com wrote: > I'm in a strange mood today (I end up here often) -- I like to see things > like > that written as: > > mplayer -novideo <file> > > or > > mplayer -novideo <filename> > > It makes it more clear what is "fixed text" and what is a variable / > parameter.
Clear to YOU. But then you get the occasional fool who puts the literal < and > signs in their command. Basically, there isn't any good way to write example commands in standard ASCII text without confusing *someone*. The OP was happy with the answer that was given, so it worked. Arguing that a different markup syntax might have worked better is just wasting time. > (Of course, it doesn't work for code that requires < and > in the syntax ;-( One of my pet peeves is the recent trend (last few years) of people putting `backticks` around their example shell commands in IRC. Some of the common markup systems use backticks to mean "display this with a fixed-width terminal-style font". Unfortunately, IRC is *not* one of those systems, and in technical channels that deal with Unix shell commands, where backticks can be part of the actual shell command syntax (albeit deprecated), it can be extremely confusing whether the user intended the backticks to be literal, or part of their markup. I've actually seen users put commands with `...` around them in their bash scripts, then ask why it's not working. More than once. (And then there's mysql. Oh my god, don't get me started on mysql.)
