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Re: Trying to understand man page for dd

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On Mon 29 May 2017 at 06:59:23 (-0500), Richard Owlett wrote:

> I think the is a subtle bug in the man page.
> I introduces the two lines of code saying:
>   > Sending a USR1 signal to a running 'dd' process makes it print
>   > I/O statistics to standard error and then resume copying.
> I believe that to accurately describe the code at
> 
> https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/dd-invocation.html#dd-invocation
> *NOT* the code on the man page.

The two lines you quote don't "introduce" anything. They describe
the action of dd when you send a USR1 signal to it, a primary
purpose of the man page.

> I realize now that was the discrepancy that prompted my question.
> I had gone to the man page to double check syntax. Spotted the code
> a thought "a way to display progress information when copying".
> 
> I can "sort of" understand syntactically correct code. The less said
> of my programming skills the better ;/ How I "read" the code just
> didn't jibe with the description.
> 
> Am I correct that there is a problem with the man page?

Not that I can see. A terse illustration of program output might
be seen as an infrequent but welcome addition to a man page.
However, others might prefer not to lengthen the man page (which
is a one chunk affair) with tutorials, or even examples,
preferring to leave that for info nodes or other more extensive
documentation.

Cheers,
David.

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Thread

Trying to understand man page for dd Richard Owlett <rowlett@cloud85.net> - 2017-05-28 14:00 +0200
  Re: Trying to understand man page for dd JPlews <jw@plews.org.uk> - 2017-05-28 14:10 +0200
    Re: Trying to understand man page for dd Richard Owlett <rowlett@cloud85.net> - 2017-05-28 14:30 +0200
    Re: Trying to understand man page for dd Ulf Volmer <u.volmer@u-v.de> - 2017-06-02 00:00 +0200
      Re: Trying to understand man page for dd Curt <curty@free.fr> - 2017-06-03 14:00 +0200
  Re: Trying to understand man page for dd The Wanderer <wanderer@fastmail.fm> - 2017-05-28 14:10 +0200
    Re: Trying to understand man page for dd Richard Owlett <rowlett@cloud85.net> - 2017-05-28 14:30 +0200
  Re: Trying to understand man page for dd "Thomas Schmitt" <scdbackup@gmx.net> - 2017-05-28 14:50 +0200
    Re: Trying to understand man page for dd Richard Owlett <rowlett@cloud85.net> - 2017-05-28 15:00 +0200
  Re: Trying to understand man page for dd David <bouncingcats@gmail.com> - 2017-05-29 02:50 +0200
    Re: Trying to understand man page for dd "Thomas Schmitt" <scdbackup@gmx.net> - 2017-05-29 08:30 +0200
      Re: Trying to understand man page for dd Richard Owlett <rowlett@cloud85.net> - 2017-05-29 14:10 +0200
        Re: Trying to understand man page for dd David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2017-05-29 15:40 +0200
          Re: Trying to understand man page for dd Richard Owlett <rowlett@cloud85.net> - 2017-05-29 16:20 +0200
            Re: Trying to understand man page for dd "Thomas Schmitt" <scdbackup@gmx.net> - 2017-05-29 17:20 +0200
            Re: Trying to understand man page for dd David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2017-05-29 17:20 +0200
        Re: Trying to understand man page for dd David <bouncingcats@gmail.com> - 2017-05-30 04:30 +0200
    Re: Trying to understand man page for dd mbroe@oakland.edu - 2017-05-31 15:20 +0200

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