Re: [RFC v1] man/man2/at.2: Add page

[Alejandro Colomar <alx+linux-man@kernel.org>]

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Hi Andrey,

> Date: 2026-10-26 13:27:16+0100
> From: Andrey Albershteyn <aalbersh@kernel.org>
>
> On 2026-10-23 19:40:37, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> > This page documents conventions common to several system calls
> > (most of them conventionally named ...at()).
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Alejandro Colomar <alx@kernel.org>
> > ---
> > 
> > Hi!
> > 
> > We have a lot of repeated documentation about these system calls, and
> > each one has sligght differences, and some syscalls even have actual
> > behavior differences (such as some accepting NULL, other not, and others
> > documenting that not while they most likely accept NULL).
> > 
> > This documentation aims to unify the behavior of as many at() syscalls
> > as possible, and document the odd ones explicitly so that differences
> > are known and justified.
> > 
> > If you maintain or know of system calls that don't behave as specified
> > in this page, I'm very interested in having a disussion about them.
> > 
> > If you know some mistake in this page (for example, I have not yet
> > documented anything about NULL, because I want to have a discussion
> > about it), please also let me know.
> > 
> > I'll reply to this email with a copy of the manual page as it looks when
> > formatted, so you don't need to apply the patch to be able to read it.
> > 
> > 
> > Have a lovely night!
> > Alex
> > 
> 
> Looks good to me, this should probably be a series including patches
> which update other man pages to reference this. Wouldn't it be
> better to describe differences on the pages itself, for examples,
> for file_attr:
> 
> 	The dirfd, path and flags arguments are described in *at()*,
> 	with following discrepancy - NULL value could be used for
> 	path argument meaning empty string.

Agree; I'm working on patching pages to refer to this one.

And also agree: the differences should be stated in each page, and
avoided in the main at(2) page.

However, we should minimize differences.  And also, there are
differences that are currently undocumented, and we should discover
them (by asking someone who knows, I guess).  Who is the right person to
be CCed on this?  Do you know anyone who's been working in at()
functions heavily?

I'll send a v2, with some pages being updated (still incomplete).


Have a lovely day!
Alex

-- 
<https://www.alejandro-colomar.es>

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