[4756] in Athena Bugs
omitted information in uuencode manpage
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Fri Apr 13 12:33:21 1990
Date: Fri, 13 Apr 90 12:33:03 -0400
From: "Jonathan I. Kamens" <jik@pit-manager.MIT.EDU>
To: mjbauer@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Cc: bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: bugs[4702]
> Date: Fri, 06 Apr 90 12:18:46 EDT
> From: Thanatos <mjbauer@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
>
> The uuencode manpage omits this from the synopsis section:
>
> uuencode filename tempfilename
>
> (I'm not certain if the filenames are optional or not -- all I know is that
> without the tempfilename, the program will sit and loop)
>
> The description section should have something like this:
>
> Uuencode takes the named source file (default standard input) and produces
> an encoded version on the standard output. The temporary file is a work
> file for the program, and will be deleted after the coding is finished.
There is no bug here, or, at least, the bug is not what you have
said it is. The head of the uuencode man page states:
SYNOPSIS
uuencode [ source ] remotedest | mail sys1!sys2!..!decode
uudecode [ file ]
It is standard operating procedure in man pages to use `[' and `]' to
indicate that something is optional. Therefore, the synopsis of the
uuencode command above indicated that the specification of a source
filename is optional, while the specification of a remote destination
file name is not.
The "remotedest" in the synopsis refers to the filename under which
the file should be saved when it is extracted on the remote system.
Perhaps this will be made clearer in the man page, and I will forward
your suggestion to the documentation group and suggest that they make
this change.
I'm not sure what you're talking about when you mention a
"tempfilename". Uuencode doesn't use any temporary files; therefore,
the second filename you specify (or the first, if you only specify one
filename) is NOT a temporary file, and is NOT deleted after the
encoding is finished. As I said above, the second filename specifies
the filename in which the file should be saved when it is extracted
using uudecode.
Jonathan Kamens
Project Athena Quality Assurance
