Re: true

> is this a joke? or poor usage of a man-page template? or an honest
> mistake?

Generally folks on the bug list always try to make sure people get a
reasonable response to bug reports submitted.  But I am sorry that I
cannot discern what issue you are trying to report in the mail that
you submitted.  I could only see confusion over the options and
therefore will only answer that.

> Obviously, since the command line arguments are ignored, neither --help
> nor --version do ANYTHING.

The man page is automatically generated from the --help output by a
command called help2man and the "or:" was lost in the translation.  It
will either ignore the command line arguments OR it will take one of
those two options.  The --help output shows the details.

  true --help
  Usage: true [ignored command line arguments]
    or:  true OPTION

But your man page seems truncated.  It should have had a section
directing you to the 'info true' page for the complete documentation
on the command.  There you would have found the following:

     By default, `true' honors the `--help' and `--version' options.
  However, that is contrary to POSIX, so when the environment variable
  `POSIXLY_CORRECT' is set, `true' ignores _all_ command line arguments,
  including `--help' and `--version'.

Therefore it only ignores those if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.  Otherwise
you will get the version output and the help output from the command.

Here is what the standards say about it.

  http://www.unix-systems.org/single_unix_specification_v2/xcu/true.html

HTH
Bob

> okay - this is taken from the man page for true (as distributed with
> Slackware linux 8.0)
> 
> NAME
>        true - do nothing, successfully
> 
> SYNOPSIS
>        true [ignored command line arguments]
>        true OPTION
> 
> DESCRIPTION
>        Exit with a status code indicating success.
> 
>        These option names may not be abbreviated.
> 
>        --help display this help and exit
> 
>        --version
>               output version information and exit
> 
> REPORTING BUGS
>        Report bugs to <[email protected]>.
> 
> 
> is this a joke? or poor usage of a man-page template? or an honest
> mistake?
> 
> Obviously, since the command line arguments are ignored, neither --help
> nor --version do ANYTHING.
> I find this to be funny even if it was intentional.  if not, its even
> funnier.