Re: All caps .TH page name

Ingo Schwarze
2022-07-22T16:19:49Z

Hi Branden,

G. Branden Robinson wrote on Thu, Jul 21, 2022 at 01:36:20PM -0500:

> I would take a jaundiced view toward any software project
> that distinguished its man page names, whether internally or from
> others' solely by a difference in lettercase.

Inside one project, causing such clashes is certainly a bad idea.
But just as same-case clashes sometimes happen accidentally -
consider this on OpenBSD with the "mono" package installed -

$ man mdoc | sed -n 4p
mdoc - semantic markup language for formatting manual pages
$ man 1 mdoc | sed -n 4p
mdoc - Mono documentation management tool

different-case clashes also happen occasionally:

$ man -T ascii err | sed -n '4p;5p'
err, verr, errc, verrc, errx, verrx, warn, vwarn, warnc,
vwarnc, warnx, vwarnx - formatted error messages
$ man -T ascii ERR | sed -n '4p'
ERR - OpenSSL error codes

$ man -T ascii sha256 | sed -n '4p;5p'
md5, sha1, sha256, sha512 - calculate a message digest (checksum)
for a file
$ man -T ascii SHA256 | sed -n '4p;5p;6p;7p'
SHA1, SHA1_Init, SHA1_Update, SHA1_Final, SHA224, SHA224_Init,
SHA224_Update, SHA224_Final, SHA256, SHA256_Init, SHA256_Update,
SHA256_Final, SHA384, SHA384_Init, SHA384_Update, SHA384_Final,
SHA512, SHA512_Init, SHA512_Update, SHA512_Final - Secure Hash
Algorithm

Admittedly, these clashes are extremely rare, so it's not a big issue
either way, at least not for practical purposes.

Yours,
Ingo