Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!watdragon!dvadura
From: dvadura@watdragon.waterloo.edu (Dennis Vadura)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Bug in make man page.
Message-ID: <17523@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Date: 25 Oct 89 01:41:25 GMT
Reply-To: dvadura@watdragon.waterloo.edu (Dennis Vadura)
Distribution: world
Organization: Computer Science Dept., University of Waterloo
Lines: 43

Someone here (Anthony Scian) pointed this out, I did some checking,
and this one has been around a loooooong time:

from the BSD man page:

>     Interrupt and quit cause the target to be deleted unless the
>     target is a directory or depends on the special name
>     ".PRECIOUS".


which is ofcourse backwards, it should read:

	... unless the target is a directory or is a dependency of the
	special name ".PRECIOUS".

I wonder how long this has been in the man page.  My guess is forever, and
that it slips by since people read it, get it wrong, but ofcourse it's right
so they never notice they read the manpage wrong.

[BTW:  Just checked my SYSV manpage from NCR, and they have the same excerpt
       that I included above.  The SunOS Make User's Guide documents the
       correct behaviour.

       And I got the following piece of mail concerning the above:

>>>     Interrupt and quit cause the target to be deleted unless the
>>>     target is a directory or depends on the special name
>>>     ".PRECIOUS".
>
>Indeed it has--it's in the v7 manual, dated January 1979, except that "is
>a directory or" isn't included there.  (Make isn't in the v6 manual at all,
>so this is as far back as the error could go.)  Is there any special honour
>for undetected documentation errors more than a decade old?
>
>                      --David Taylor ]

-interesting trivia
-dennis
-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The only happy people are Single MEN   |Dennis  UUCP,BITNET:    dvadura@water
and Married WOMEN.                     |Vadura  EDU,CDN,CSNET:  dvadura@waterloo
================================================================================