GNU bug report logs - #11020
man page Tail : last -> most recent?

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Message #8 received at 11020 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
To: Gijs Hillenius <gijs <at> hillenius.net>
Cc: 11020 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#11020: man page Tail : last -> most recent?
Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2012 11:27:20 -0700

On 03/15/2012 06:23 AM, Gijs Hillenius wrote:
 
> I just happen to notice an extra space in the man page of tail between

Thanks, but that's due to nroff justification to make the line lengths all the same;
it's a property of how your man pages are formatting, not 'tail' per se,
which means the proper change would be somewhere in the man-page macros
not in coreutils proper.

> I would write
> 
> Print the most recent 10 lines of each FILE to standard output ....

Hmm, why is "most recent" better than "last"?  "Most recent" is a longer phrase,
and technically, the lines most recently added to a file are not
necessarily its last lines, so "most recent" is less
technically accurate.

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