Re: documentation bug re character range expressions

[Marcel (Felix) Giannelia]

On 09/06/11 11:31, Chet Ramey wrote:
> [...]
> No, it doesn't.  It's not part of any standard, and it's not part of
> pattern matching, so I implemented it with the traditional C semantics
> because that seemed the most straightforward.

Pity the implementor of character range expressions didn't have the same 
thought ;)

> > I realize it's pedantic, but documentation should be pedantically accurate
> > :)  I would be OK with changing the man page so it says, "sorts between
> > those two characters in a list of single-character strings", as that would
> > also describe the current behaviour.
> But it only matches a single character, by definition.  It should not be
> necessary to specify the list of single-character strings part.

I guess that's true. It's still confusing, though -- it would make more 
sense to me if it simply went by sort weights and thus considered 'c' 
and 'C' equivalent... but I guess then you'd get people asking "how come 
[a] is case-sensitive and [a-z] isn't?". Then again, we've already got 
people asking that -- I guess range expressions are just tricky no 
matter how you look at them.

> [...]
> The bash texinfo documentation says just about the same thing.

There's an 'info bash'?! Oh, so there is. OK, then I revise my suggested 
revision to the man page -- it's missing a mention of the info manual 
under the SEE ALSO section. (Most other commands that have an info 
manual have something like "The full documentation for ls is maintained 
as a  Texinfo  manual. If the info and ls programs are properly 
installed [...]")

Guess it's time I really learned how to navigate texinfo... (Do I come 
across as old-fashioned nowadays for still using man?)

~Felix.