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bug#9531: md5sum: confusing documentation for file type output


From: Reuben Thomas
Subject: bug#9531: md5sum: confusing documentation for file type output
Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2011 14:01:31 +0100

The documentation says:

The default mode is to print a line with checksum, a character
indicating type (`*' for binary, `
 ' for text), and name for each FILE.

There are two problems here. First, a small one: the second character
is a space character, which needs to be non-breaking, and preferably
explained, as in "` ' (a space)". If you agree, I'll make a patch for
the info and man page.

Secondly, looking at the code, this isn't really what md5sum does.
Rather, it prints '*' if in binary mode (--binary, or if O_BINARY is
non-zero), and ' ' if in text mode (--text, or if O_BINARY is zero),
but doesn't actually look at the file. It's not obvious to me why it's
useful to output what mode md5sum is in (rather than doing some
analysis of the file) but something needs changing here, whether it's
behavior or documentation.

-- 
http://rrt.sc3d.org





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