Man pages review

This page is part of the Plan 9 Documentation Task Force

The plan is to review every man page (see list below) for errors and disagreements with current implementations of what they document. Quite often options have been added over time without updating the manual page. Also check if the information printed by usage() functions is accurate.

Getting the documentation accurate again is the primary goal. Do not produce large diffs for simple rewording (you might unnecessarily remove the original authors style).

Some scripts related to manual page checking can be found in /sys/lib/man. Checkman.awk is the most useful one (XXX should merge plan9ports version back into plan9). Make sure you have read man(6). Finally, you should check if there is a plan9port version of the manual page and keep them in sync (the plan9ports may be more up to date).

PROCEDURE:

SUBMITING MAN PAGE FIXES

(Probably we should document clearly how to write test cases for libraries and maybe commands and file systems so we can build a set of test cases that can be run easily, a testing framework for that will probably be needed, and a place to store it, probably in sources)

SECTION 1: COMMANDS

SECTION 2: SYSTEM AND LIBRARY CALLS

SECTION 3: DEVICES

SECTION 4: FILE SERVERS

SECTION 5: PLAN 9 FILE PROTOCOL, 9P

SECTION 6: FILE FORMATS, MISC

SECTION 7: DATABASES

SECTION 8: SYSTEM ADMINISTRATION

This is the snipet used to generate the list of man pages:

for ( i in ?) {
	echo
	echo SECTION $i
	echo
	cd $i 
	ls|grep -v INDEX| sed -e 's/$/('^$i^')/' -e 's/^/ *	/'
	cd ..
}