null terminating byte man pages

null terminating byte man pages

[Jon Grant]

Hello

readdir (3) man page says:
"the terminating null byte"

Could it be updated to follow "man strlen" page and say:

"the terminating null byte ('\0')"

Other pages only say "null byte", e.g. getdomainname
http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/setdomainname.2.html

Should they all be changed to clarify?

others: gethostname, readlink, stat, argz_add, asprintf, catgets,
confstr, getcwd, getline,
getlogin, memchr, pthread_setname_np, strerror, strfmon, strftime,
sysconf, inotify,

wprintf - should also say ('\0') ?

Thank you for looking into this
Best regards, Jon
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Re: null terminating byte man pages

[Michael Kerrisk]

Hi Jon,

On 04/25/13 15:07, Jon Grant wrote:
> Hello
> 
> readdir (3) man page says:
> "the terminating null byte"
> 
> Could it be updated to follow "man strlen" page and say:
> 
> "the terminating null byte ('\0')"
> 
> Other pages only say "null byte", e.g. getdomainname
> http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/setdomainname.2.html
> 
> Should they all be changed to clarify?
> 
> others: gethostname, readlink, stat, argz_add, asprintf, catgets,
> confstr, getcwd, getline,
> getlogin, memchr, pthread_setname_np, strerror, strfmon, strftime,
> sysconf, inotify,
> 
> wprintf - should also say ('\0') ?

So (1) there is some inconsistency in the pages with respect to this
point, but I'm not too worried about it and (2) C programmers should
know what a terminating null byte is. Therefore, I'm not really 
inclined to fix this in every case, but I did add the detail to 
these pages:

readdir.2
asprintf.3
catgets.3
getline.3
getlogin.3
pthread_setname_np.3
readdir.3
strerror.3
inotify.7

Cheers,

Michael
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