Re: man page, usage text and filter expression formatting

[Denis Ovsienko <denis () ovsienko info>]

On Mon, 20 Oct 2025 15:30:01 -0700
Guy Harris <gharris () sonic net> wrote:

> So, not surprisingly, no consistency, given that commands come from
> various projects.

Here is a couple more examples:

Linux iproute2 uses mostly uppercase for usage message, and the man
pages, the man pages use mostly uppercase and a mix of italic and
<arg>, the HTML/PDF command reference looks no longer maintained, but
its version from 1999 uses just uppercase where it certainly could have
used italic.

Perl uses italic for its command-line options in the man pages and the
online manual, and plain lowercase in the usage message.  However, the
language-specific man pages use plain uppercase in all formats, for
example, perlfunc(1) says:

       chdir EXPR
       chdir FILEHANDLE
       chdir DIRHANDLE
       chdir

The latter leads me to think that eventually it would be nice to have:
* a consistent formatting convention for the command-line arguments, and
* a consistent formatting convention for the primitives in
  pcap-filter(7) and pcap_geterr(3PCAP).

But perhaps those conventions do not have to be the same if that would
help to achieve the best overall result.

-- 
    Denis Ovsienko
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