"Pieter Droogendijk" <gin@binky.homeunix.org> wrote[color=blue]
> On Fri, 11 Jul 2003 22:18:16 GMT, Blah wrote:[color=green]
> > "Olivier Ramare" <ramare@agat.univ-lille1.fr> wrote[color=darkred]
> > > Dan Pop wrote:
> > > [...]
> > > >>Or should some other print format be specified?
> > > >
> > > > What does your C book have to say on this issue?
> > >
> > > That's an interesting question. Because Kernighan and
> > > Ritchie doesn't say a word on that, am I wrong?
> > > Then "man printf" doesn't go that far either, and
> > > the info program being most probably wrongly installed
> > > by Suse, "info printf" says it can't find any node
> > > called "Top".... Well in fact, "man 3 printf" is
> > > excellent.
> > > So to whom should we have asked this question? Or more
> > > precisely, where is the bible hidden? Always through
> > > "man"?[/color]
> >
> > Hmmmm.... I just tried "man printf", "man 3 printf" and "info printf"
> > and every one of them got the same result:
> >
> > "Bad command or file name"[/color]
>
> That would be because you're using windows.[/color]
Exactly my point. Not every machine has man pages, and more
importantly, those that do don't always make a clear distinction between
what is standard and what is implementation specific. While they tend to be
excellent sources of information (though occasionally remarkably spare on
some topics), they certainly shouldn't be considered a universal C bible.
They're great so long as you know their limitations.
[color=blue]
>[color=green]
> > So it's unlikely that man pages would serve well as the universal
> > "bible".[/color]
>
> Hard to dismiss it if you've never even heard about it before. Maybe you
> should go look for yourself first:
http://www.sonic.net/cgi-bin/man .
> Try '3 printf'.[/color]
On the Solaris systems that I do most of my work on man -s3 printf is
just fine, no need for me to check a website to get them.