[please don't top-post on technical lists] On 11/15/2011 08:29 AM, abdallah clark wrote: > So, here goes. > > SIZE may be (or may be an integer optionally followed by) one > of following: > KB 1000, K 1024, MB 1000*1000, M 1024*1024, and so on for G, T, > P, E, Z, Y. > > That's a run-on sentence, jammed up with at least three different > ideas that need to be separated. It also implies that one could use > 1000*1000 and 1024*1024, which is certainly not the case. Talk about > what does first, in just one sentence, if you have to, but let > it be separate. Paul did just that: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2011-11/msg00088.html The wording in the next release of coreutils will have SIZE described in a separate sentence from the description of suffixes, and will include an example. SIZE is an integer with an optional suffix (example: 10MB). Suffixes are: KB 1000, K 1024, MB 1000*1000, M 1024*1024, and so on for G, T, P, E, Z, Y. > Explain what the suffixes mean in a separate sentence. My preference > would actually be to omit that explanation. But you must recognize > that a Newbie is not going to intuitively accept that M = MiB. If you want to know as much as possible about coreutils, then the man page already tells you to read 'info coreutils "ls invocation"', and on the info page, we DO give lots of examples and describe M vs. MB vs. MiB. But for a short --help example (which in turn is copied into the man page), it is sufficient to merely document the shortest (and most popular) two forms: a suffix letter in isolation is based on units of 1024, and a suffix letter + B is based on units of 1000. If you can provide a one-liner phrasing of that concept which reads better than what is already there, then please do so. > You really should change the man pages to be consistent, for our sake. They already are consistent. 'man ls' and 'ls --help' give the same information. That information may not be complete (for completeness, use 'info coreutils'), but what is there is accurate. -- Eric Blake eblake@redhat.com +1-919-301-3266 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org