The const specifier is not part of the prototype (it only applies to the
implementation), so showing it here confuses the reader.
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
stdarg.h is now 30 years old, and gcc long ago (2004) ceased to
implement <varargs.h>. There seems little value in keeping this
text.
See https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=202907
Reported-by: Vincent Lefevre <vincent@vinc17.net>
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
The BUGS section already explains why you need to be cautious
about using mallinfo, but given the number of bug reports we see
on Android, it seems not many people are reading that far. Call it
out up front.
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Since glibc 2.8, commit 68631c8eb92, the malloc_trim function has
iterated over all arenas and free'd back to the OS all page runs
that were free. This allows an application to call malloc_trim to
consolidate fragmented chunks and free back any pages it can to
potentially reduce RSS usage.
This correctness of the man page was recently brought to light by
an article [1] where Ruby developers discovered that malloc_trim
did not behave as the man page indicated.
This change makes it clear that the intent of malloc_trim is to
trim all space that is no longer needed, and any restrictions are
implementation details. In the notes we highlight the change in
behaviour for post glibc 2.8 and pre glibc 2.8.
[1] https://www.joyfulbikeshedding.com/blog/2019-03-14-what-causes-ruby-memory-bloat.html#a-magic-trick-trimming
Signed-off-by: Carlos O'Donell <carlos@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Where is the initial read position for an "a+" stream?
POSIX leaves this unspecified. Most BSD man pages are silent, and MacOS
has the ambiguous "The stream is positioned at the end of the file", not
differentiating between reads and writes other than to say that fseek(3)
does not affect writes. glibc's documentation explicitly specifies that
the initial read position is the beginning of the file.
My new wording is based on the BSD implementations, so you may prefer
to replace the non-glibc section with "unspecified", or indeed remove
all claims about the initial read position.
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Egmont suggested adding this, because the string "..." appears
at several other points in the page, but just to indicate that
some text is omitted from example code.
Reported-by: Egmont Koblinger <egmont@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Unlike strerror_r(), strerror_l() doesn't take buffer length as an
argument.
Signed-off-by: Jakub Wilk <jwilk@jwilk.net>
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Remove a longstanding mystery in the text of the page, by
explaining a case where the value returned for a symbol may be
NULL. (However, there are presumably other cases, since the text
in the dlsym(3) manual page pre-dates the invention of IFUNCs.)
See also
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13941944/why-can-the-value-of-the-symbol-returned-by-dlsym-be-null
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Quoting Branden:
*roff escape sequences may sometimes look like C escapes, but that
is misleading. *roff is in part a macro language and that means
recursive expansion to arbitrary depths.
You can get away with "\\" in a context where no macro expansion
is taking place, but try to spell a literal backslash this way in
the argument to a macro and you will likely be unhappy with
results.
Try viewing the attached file with "man -l".
"\e" is the preferred and portable way to get a portable "escape
literal" going back to CSTR #54, the original Bell Labs troff
paper.
groff(7) discusses the issue:
\\ reduces to a single backslash; useful to delay its
interpretation as escape character in copy mode. For a
printable backslash, use \e, or even better \[rs], to be
independent from the current escape character.
As of groff 1.22.4, groff_man(7) does as well:
\e Widely used in man pages to represent a backslash output
glyph. It works reliably as long as the .ec request is
not used, which should never happen in man pages, and it
is slightly more portable than the more exact ‘\(rs’
(“reverse solidus”) escape sequence.
People not concerned with portability to extremely old troffs should
probably just use \(rs (or \[rs]), as it means "the backslash
glyph", not "the glyph corresponding to whatever the current escape
character is".
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Quoting Branden:
*roff systems will interpret the period in the unpatched
page as sentence-ending punctuation and put inter-sentence
spacing after it. (This might not be visible on
nroff/terminal devices, but it is more likely to be on
typesetter/PostScript/PDF output).
groff_man(7) in groff 1.22.4 attempts to throw man page
writers a bone here:
\& Zero‐width space. Append to an input line to prevent
an end‐of‐ sentence punctuation sequence from being
recognized as such, or insert at the beginning of an
input line to prevent a dot or apostrophe from being
interpreted as the beginning of a roff request.
Reported-by: Bjarni Ingi Gislason <bjarniig@rhi.hi.is>
Reported-by: G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Use a single-font-style macro (".B", ".I") for a single argument.
Remove unneeded quotation marks (").
The output from "nroff" and "groff" is unchanged, except for the change
1) '-1' to '\-1' in the file "timegm.3"
2) to separate ',' from a word in the file "uselocale.3".
Signed-off-by: Bjarni Ingi Gislason <bjarniig@rhi.hi.is>
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Historically, at least FIFOs and pipes yielded the error EINVAL.
Reported-by: Jakub Wilk <jwilk@jwilk.net>
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
According to the latest glibc, the bsd_signal() function is just
declared when POSIX.1-2008 (or newer) instead of POSIX.1-2001 is
not set since glibc v2.26.
Please see the following code from signal/signal.h:
-----------------------------------------------------------------
/* The X/Open definition of `signal' conflicts with the BSD version.
So they defined another function `bsd_signal'. */
extern __sighandler_t bsd_signal (int __sig, __sighandler_t __handler)
__THROW;
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Signed-off-by: Xiao Yang <yangx.jy@cn.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Jakub Wilk