The --canonicalize options in the readlink(1) man page would be much easier to keep straight if they were in least-to-most restrictive order, rather than alphabetic order.
Here is a diff that changes it (to be applied to the uncompressed /usr/share/man/man1/readlink.1.gz); it was generated from Fedora 30 Updates coreutils-common-8.31-2.fc30 . The result is this order: -m, --canonicalize-missing -f, --canonicalize -e, --canonicalize-existing --- readlink.1.orig 2019-05-03 07:41:24.000000000 -0700 +++ readlink.1 2019-05-06 07:09:17.156226980 -0700 @@ -10,6 +10,11 @@ .PP Print value of a symbolic link or canonical file name .TP +\fB\-m\fR, \fB\-\-canonicalize\-missing\fR +canonicalize by following every symlink in +every component of the given name recursively, +without requirements on components existence +.TP \fB\-f\fR, \fB\-\-canonicalize\fR canonicalize by following every symlink in every component of the given name recursively; @@ -20,11 +25,6 @@ every component of the given name recursively, all components must exist .TP -\fB\-m\fR, \fB\-\-canonicalize\-missing\fR -canonicalize by following every symlink in -every component of the given name recursively, -without requirements on components existence -.TP \fB\-n\fR, \fB\-\-no\-newline\fR do not output the trailing delimiter .HP
