[lug] man pages in different distros

[Gary Hodges]

Are the man pages throughout the various distributions consistent or do 
they vary in content?  This came up the other day when a colleague was 
getting some programs to run on a RH box.  He was having some trouble 
getting sort to work right and came in my office complaining about the 
lame sort man page when compared to the DEC sort man page.  I have to 
agree that the DEC man page had way more info and examples than the 
Linux man page.  I went to the meeting the other night and forgot to ask 
about this.

On sort...  My colleague was having trouble with the --key option.  We 
got it working, but I'm wondering if there is a typo in the man page? 
If I understand these things, the square brackets indicate optional 
arguments, but in the description of --key the left bracket is 
highlighted as if it's required.  To get it working we gave sort the 
following argument <-k4n,4n>.  It didn't work with just <-k4n>.  Seemed 
kind of strange to me since the second argument I believe is optional.

Gary