Lots of content was updated on the xz man page.
Technical improvements:
- Start a new sentence on a new line.
- Use fairly short lines.
- Use constant-width font for examples (where supported).
- Some minor cleanups.
Thanks to Jonathan Nieder for some language fixes.
A minus sign is larger, easier to see in a printout, and more
likely to use the same glyph as ASCII hyphen-minus in a terminal
than a hyphen. Since broken manual pagers do not find hyphens
when the user searches for a hyphen-minus, minus signs are also
easier to search for. So use minus signs instead of hyphens to
render sample terminal output.
Attempts to compare two compressed files result in no output and
exit status 2.
Instead of going to standard output, ‘diff’ output is being
captured in the xz_status variable along with the exit status from
the decompression commands. Later, when this variable is examined
for nonzero status codes, numerals from dates in the ‘diff’ output
make it appear as though decompression failed.
So let the ‘diff’ output leak to standard output with another file
descriptor. (This trick is used in all similar contexts elsewhere
in xzdiff and in the analogous context in gzip’s zdiff script.)
It can be somewhat confusing that
less < some_file.txt
works fine, whereas
xzless < some_file.txt.xz
does not. Since version 429, ‘less’ allows a filter specified in
the LESSOPEN environment variable to preprocess its input even if
it comes from standard input, if $LESSOPEN begins with ‘|-’. So
set $LESSOPEN to take advantage of this feature.
Check less’s version at runtime so xzless can continue to work
with older versions.
use AC_PROG_SED. We don't do anything fancy with sed,
so this should work OK. libtool 2.2 sets SED but 1.5
doesn't, so $(SED) happened to work when using libtool 2.2.
the latest versions found from gzip CVS repository.
configure will try to find a POSIX shell to be used by
the scripts. This should ease portability on systems
which have pre-POSIX /bin/sh.
xzgrep and xzdiff support .xz, .lzma, .gz, and .bz2 files.
xzmore and xzless support only .xz and .lzma files.
The name of the xz executable used in these scripts is
now correct even if --program-transform-name has been used.
This adds lzdiff, lzgrep, and lzmore to the list of symlinks to install.
It also installs symlinks for the manual pages and removes the new
symlinks on uninstall.
Lasse Collin
Jonathan Nieder
ABCD
Jim Meyering