7 ms·
One place where the MSDN docs is way ahead of the manpages is the documentation of function paramters. For instance, here's the ouput of man 2 write. ssize_t
by ekr 10y ago
One place where the MSDN docs is way ahead of the manpages is the documentation of function paramters. For instance, here's the ouput of man 2 write.
ssize_t write(int fd, const void *buf, size_t count);
DESCRIPTION
write() writes up to count bytes from the buffer pointed buf to the file referred to by the file descriptor fd.
The number of bytes written may be less than count if, for example, there is insufficient space on the underlying physical medium, or the RLIMIT_FSIZE resource limit is encountered (see setrlimit(2)), or call was interrupted by a signal handler after having written less than count bytes. (See also (7).)
For a seekable file (i.e., one to which lseek(2) may be applied, for example, a regular file) writing takes place at the file offset, and the file offset is incremented by the number of bytes actually written. If the file was open(2)ed with O_APPEND, the file offset is first set to the end of the file before writing. The adjustment of the file offset and the write operation are performed as an atomic step.
I have to go through a block of text scanning for the parameter I'm interested in. When I'm using the manpage as a reference (which is most of the time), this is less than ideal.
MSDN indexes the documentation by parameter so you can quickly find what you're interested in.
LE. Sample msdn link for comparison: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa365747(v=vs.85).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3... .
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoThat's actually just one sentence you have to scan, so I don't totally see the issue.
- viraptor 10y agoIt could still be better. It could be 0 sentences to scan it it was formatted in a better way.
- brohee 10y agoThat's under Linux (not sure if that man page is maintained by glibc or the kernel seeing as it is a syscall). That's pretty different under a system that cares : http://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-current/man2/write.2 http://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-current/man2/write.2
- St-Clock 10y agoI'm sorry, how is it different than the linux example? They both describe all the parameters in the first sentence of the description.
- brohee 10y agoI was mislead by the non formatting in the HN paste. Looking at https://linux.die.net/man/2/write https://linux.die.net/man/2/write it's about as good.
- koytch 10y agoSections 2 and 3 contain the most readable man pages out there. The pages in sections 1 and 8 are often terrible, being the result of some texinfo->man filter.
- pjc50 10y agoOne of the things that never ceases to amaze me is how slow MSDN is. It feels faster to look something up on stackoverflow, even if it's not as well organised. Version-specificness on MSDN is often a little odd. I do Windows CE and for some reason Google returns hits from the Wince5 docs more often than the rest, and it's not straightforward to get to the docs for a different version. Sometimes this is important.