Bug 250217

Summary:	Perl re and re network driver man page conflict
Product:	Documentation	Reporter:	Maigurs <maigurs>
Component:	Manual Pages	Assignee:	Mateusz Piotrowski <0mp>
Status:	Closed Works As Intended
Severity:	Affects Many People	CC:	0mp, doc
Priority:	---
Version:	Latest
Hardware:	Any
OS:	Any

Description Maigurs 2020-10-09 09:39:16 UTC

When searching for re (re0) network adapter driver man page I found re - Perl program to alter regular expressions behavior. 
It is a bit confusing as other drivers can be found in this way (ath, em as an example)

Comment 1 Andriy Gapon freebsd_committer

2020-10-09 11:16:30 UTC

What do you mean by a conflict?
Do you know about manual page sections?
Do you know about man -a?
The same name can be re-used in different sections for different purposes.

Comment 2 Mateusz Piotrowski freebsd_committer

2020-10-09 12:33:02 UTC

This is expected behavior. Please see the description of the -s flag in the man(1) manual page. It explains why "re" first matches the re(1) utility instead of the re(4) driver.

Also, remember that you can always force man(1) to open a manual page from a specific section. In your case it would look like this:

    $ man 4 re

Hope it helps :)

Comment 3 Maigurs 2020-10-09 12:38:41 UTC

Thanks for pointing this!

Best regards

Comment 4 Maigurs 2020-10-09 12:51:55 UTC

(In reply to Andriy Gapon from comment)
I did not know that names can be reused.
Apologies for wasted bits and time.

Comment 5 Mateusz Piotrowski freebsd_committer

2020-10-09 12:54:03 UTC

(In reply to Maigurs from comment #4)

It's fine!

Perhaps there could be a handbook section about the basics of navigating around manual pages...