Re: The imperfect beauty of NetBSD

[matthew sporleder <msporleder%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 5:00 AM, Iain Hibbert <plunky%rya-online.net@localhost> 
wrote:
> On Fri, 8 Jan 2010, David Holland wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Jan 07, 2010 at 12:44:07AM -0500, Alex Goncharov wrote:
>>  > But:
>>  >
>>  >    man -S N STRING
>>  >
>>  > to work, and
>>  >
>>  >    man -S N -k STRING
>>  >
>>  > not?...
>>
>> I think you're looking for man -s, which works fine. I didn't even
>> know -S existed.
>
> its a GNU thing (and, FreeBSD uses GNU man btw).
>
> the CVS commit for our "-s" states that it follows the SysV convention,
> except that you can't provide a list eg "-s 2,3". I don't know where GNU
> got their inspiration from or why they used -S instead (-s is unused).
>

GNU man expects a section list with -S and uses no flag for a specific
section when looking up a page.  I has been silently accepting -s for
a while, however.