These flags, designed for discovering holes in a file,
were added in Linux 3.1. Included comments from Eric
Blake and Sunil Mushran.
Reviewed-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Sunil Mushran <sunil.mushran@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
As noted by Alan Curry:
According to man2/lseek.2,
This document's use of whence is incorrect English, but
maintained for historical reasons.
What is the grammatical objection?
From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]:
whence
adv 1: from what place, source, or cause
Wiktionary:
[edit] Adverb
whence (not comparable)
1. From where; from which place or source.
lseek's second parameter is a distance to be traveled, and
the third parameter chooses the starting point from which
that distance is measured. How is that not a "whence"?
Looking at some man page archives, I found that the accusation
of incorrect English goes back to before 4.4BSD. It survives
not just in the linux-man-pages but also in recent versions
of {Net,Open,Free}BSD. The name "whence" for this parameter
goes back at least to V7.
Of all the people who have read this page over the years,
am I the only one wondering... what's this about? Who decided
that "whence" was incorrect and put that note in the man page?
Was there ever anything wrong, or do we have someone's
20-year-old unresearched pet peeve lingering in the man pages?
Reported-by: Alan Curry <pacman@kosh.dhis.org>
Reported-by: Reuben Thomas <rrt@sc3d.org>
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Various pages use inconsistent terms for 'null byte' (which
is the C99/SUSv3 term for the '\0' character).
To rectify this the following changes were made in these pages:
Replace 'zero byte' with 'null byte'.
Replace 'null character' with 'null byte'.
Replace 'nulls' with 'null bytes'.
Replace 'NUL-terminated' by 'null-terminated'.
Replace 'NUL' by 'null byte'.
Replace 'terminating NUL' by 'terminating null byte'.
Replace 'final NUL' by 'terminating null byte'.
Replace 'NUL character' by 'null byte'.
Michael Kerrisk