Bug 20114

Summary:	paramaters for ln in --help mode are misleading
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	Dan Egli <dan>
Component:	fileutils	Assignee:	Bernhard Rosenkraenzer <bero>
Status:	CLOSED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	Aaron Brown <abrown>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	low
Version:	7.0	Keywords:	FutureFeature
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i386
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Enhancement
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2000-10-31 18:12:07 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Dan Egli 2000-10-31 18:12:05 UTC

the help for ln reads:
Usage: ln [OPTION]... TARGET [LINK_NAME]
  or:  ln [OPTION]... TARGET... DIRECTORY
  or:  ln [OPTION]... --target-directory=DIRECTORY TARGET...

but if someone only reads that much, they can easily get the paramaters 
backwards when creating links. Especially symlinks. To one like me, the 
above indicates that you would type this to link dir1 to link1 (link1 is a 
symlink): ln -s link1 dir1.

Recomendation: replace DIRECTORY with TARGET_DIRECTORY or something to 
help prevent confusion in the future.

Comment 1 Bernhard Rosenkraenzer 2000-11-01 18:48:53 UTC

Please discuss this change with bug-fileutils rather than Red Hat - we don't want to change the --help texts in packaging (it would probably lead to odd bug reports sent to the maintainers).