Regardless, my point is that "as with word splitting" is not exactly true, and misleading statements have no place in documentation if it's meant to be of any use to a user who needs the documentation to begin with.
In any case, adding "A backslash can be used to escape a delimiter or a newline." shouldn't make the text significantly heavier, given it already uses almost double the letters to spell out how the words are assigned to the names given in order. On Wed, Dec 23, 2020 at 4:44 PM Chet Ramey <chet.ra...@case.edu> wrote: > On 12/22/20 9:13 AM, Ilkka Virta wrote: > > Arguably it's a bug that 'help read' doesn't mention the effect of > > backslashes, other than what can be extrapolated from the description of > > -r. It only says "The line is split into fields _as with word > splitting_", > > but word splitting doesn't recognize backslashes as special. It should > not > > be necessary to read the description of all options to infer the > behaviour > > of a command as used without them. > > That isn't the function of `help'. The help documentation is intended to be > a quick reference, not to duplicate everything in the man page. > > -- > ``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer > ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates > Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU c...@case.edu http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/ >
