On 9 July 2010 11:08, Ted Harding Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk wrote:
On 09-Jul-10 09:42:15, Richard Parsons wrote:
I copied "tar -xvvzf" from the examples on the manual page. Maybe the double v means, "be even more verbose"?
Hmmm ... I don't have any man page for tar ('man tar') which gives examples of use -- on SuSE, Red Hat, or Debian. Maybe it's an Ubuntu (or other) re-write. In any case, the way command options usually work, a repetition would do nothing extra. Options are read in one by one. When a specific option is encountered, a flag is set in the running code for the command. The first 'v' would set the "verbose" flag. The second 'v' would simply set it again.
I strongly suspect a typo in that version of the man page that you are looking at!
That depends entirely on the application.
For example, tcpdump man page:
-vvv Even more verbose output. For example, telnet SB ... SE options
Asterisk does something similar. It's not hard to set the verbosity variable in the BSS section and then every time a -v is encountered in your getopt switch block, increment it. Thus you can support multi-strength options.
Regards, Srdjan