Subject: Re: bug#17961: "od -c" producing numbers greater than 255 ?

From: Bernhard Voelker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2014 08:18:12 +0200

On 07/07/2014 02:27 AM, Sebastian Pipping wrote:
> I don't really see any mention of octal fallback in there

It is already there ... in the first sentence:

  NAME
         od - dump files in octal and other formats

  SYNOPSIS
         od [OPTION]... [FILE]...
         od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]
         od --traditional [OPTION]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b] [+][LABEL][.][b]]

  DESCRIPTION
         Write  an  unambiguous  representation,  octal bytes
         by default, of FILE to standard output.
         ...

BTW: the man pages of the coreutils programs are not much more
than the output from "PROG --help".  Instead, the more detailed
documentation goes into the Texinfo manual - as mentioned at
the end of the man page:

  SEE ALSO
     ...
     info coreutils 'od invocation'

Alternatively you can choose the online version:

  http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/od-invocation.html#od-invocation

> My vote too add that or at
> least making the man page more precise about "-c", that would be cool.

The output of --help and therefore 'man od' is already quite
large.  Please read the info manual.  If you still think that
there's something missing or unclear, please tell us ... maybe
with a suggestion for the wording, or even better as a patch.

Thanks & have a nice day,
Berny