Stupid man pages

[Michael Crawford]

Berkeley 4.3 has:

NAME
     crash - what happens when a VAX  kernel crashes

DESCRIPTION
     This section explains what happens when the system crashes
     and (very briefly) how to analyze crash dumps.

     When the system crashes voluntarily it prints a message of
     the form

          panic: why i gave up the ghost

     on the console, takes a dump on a mass storage peripheral,
     and then invokes an automatic reboot procedure as described
     in reboot(8).  (If auto-reboot is disabled on the front

Now I would swear that under some rev of SunOS, the "takes a dump"
was replaced with something more polite, but under 4.0.3, it says
that again!  Maybe it got snuck back in.

System 5.2 tee(1) says:

NAME
	tee - pipe fitting

but SunOS 4.0.3 says:

NAME
     tee - replicate the standard output

I am divided on the issue of professionalization of manual pages.  I do
support it in the case that it makes manual pages clearer.  An
unsophisticated user perusing the man pages might be a little mystified
why a plumbing device was documented in the Unix Manual.

Have any marketing types tried to do anything to take daemonology out
of the system?  I imagine there may be countries that would not accept
Unix because they don't like invoking daemons.

-- 
Michael D. Crawford
Oddball Enterprises		Consulting for Apple Computer Inc.
606 Modesto Avenue		escher at apple.com
Santa Cruz, CA 95060		Applelink: escher at apple.com@INTERNET#
oddball!mike at ucscc.ucsc.edu	The opinions expressed here are solely my own.

		alias make '/bin/make & rn'