From 1ec4c065a204ae175c65488487c6b84a7f55598c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: dana Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2019 14:11:29 -0600 Subject: column: Address fill-order confusion in documentation Historical versions of column have described the default fill order as rows-then-columns and the -x order as columns-then-rows. This was misleading at best, and the util-linux implementation was updated to clarify the actual behaviour in 3e094e5fe2 (March 2017). However, the other implementations (used by *BSD, macOS, Debian, &al.) continue to use the previous wording, and a user comparing them could easily get the false impression that util-linux column has exactly the opposite fill behaviour from BSD column. To address this, a note is added to the man page explaining the change and clarifying that, despite what the BSD documentation says, the two implementations behave identically in this regard. Signed-off-by: dana --- text-utils/column.1 | 11 ++++++++++- 1 file changed, 10 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/text-utils/column.1 b/text-utils/column.1 index 9ce5879e5..84243b5bd 100644 --- a/text-utils/column.1 +++ b/text-utils/column.1 @@ -31,7 +31,7 @@ .\" .\" @(#)column.1 8.1 (Berkeley) 6/6/93 .\" -.TH COLUMN 1 "January 2017" "util-linux" "User Commands" +.TH COLUMN 1 "February 2019" "util-linux" "User Commands" .SH NAME column \- columnate lists .SH SYNOPSIS @@ -168,6 +168,15 @@ New output (since util-linux 2.23): a b c 1 3 .EE +.PP +Historical versions of this tool indicated that "rows are filled before +columns" by default, and that the +.B \-x +option reverses this. This wording did not reflect the actual behavior, and it +has since been corrected (see above). Other implementations of +.B column +may continue to use the older documentation, but the behavior should be +identical in any case. .SH "SEE ALSO" .BR colrm (1), .BR ls (1), -- cgit v1.2.3-55-g7522