3 ms·
strfry's man page gives no indication that it's a joke function. Contrast with memfrob(3).
by simoncion 16y ago
strfry's man page gives no indication that it's a joke function. Contrast with memfrob(3).
- tptacek 16y agoFrom the man page: The function below addresses the perennial programming quandary: “How do I take good data in string form and painlessly turn it into garbage?”. To make the argument that strfry isn't a joke, you might find a real program that uses it productively. I'd be interested in seeing if one exists.
- simoncion 16y agoHm. My man page doesn't have that passage: NAME strfry - randomize a string [snip] DESCRIPTION The strfry() function randomizes the contents of string by using rand(3) to randomly swap characters in the string. The result is an anagram of string. [snip] COLOPHON This page is part of release 3.32 of the Linux man-pages project. [snip] What version of the man-pages package do you have installed?
- tptacek 16y agoSorry, mine came from gnu.org and probably isn't really the man page (I misread a Google result). In any case, I'm not wrong about strfry being a gag function, and it looks (if you read upthread) that my hunch was right that nobody uses it in real code.
- simoncion 16y agoIt is a joke function. I really wish that the supplied documentation let potential users in on the joke. :) (Oh, pardon. I didn't catch that you might have thought that I thought that strfry was anything but a joke. My take on the situation is that the documentation needs patched, rather than the strfry code. :) )