[Tfug] Another poser

[Bexley Hall]

Here's a silly poser -- undoubtedly with no "right"
answer! But, maybe, some "rational" answers??

By convention, *NIX commands are referenced with
the manual section appended parenthetically.  In
some cases, set in a different typeface, etc.

But, how should commands for which man pages do not
*exist* be referenced?  I.e., commands whose man
pages have not YET been written or are otherwise
unavailable?

E.g., for years, NetBSD (and all *BSD's?) were
lacking a tar(1) man page.  Of course, since tar(1)
is so ubiquitous (in the *NIX world), it didn't
take a rocket scientist to realize that you
*still* would refer to it as "tar(1)" -- on
the assumption that *most* Eunices would place
it in the "1" section of the manual and, thus,
*BSD would undoubtedly follow.

But, what about commands that are unique to various
OS's, yet undocumented?  I would argue that the
parenthetical suffix is desirable, regardless;
especially when alternate typefaces are not
available.  But, what to put *between* the
parens?

One can argue that if a rational decision as to 
where the man page would *eventually* reside,
then that section could be referenced.  Though
this can confuse folks since an attempt to locate
the page in that section will be fruitless.

Perhaps a question mark?  Or, a dash/hyphen?
Each plays the role of placeholder. I would
argue that the question mark, when encountered,
would have me thinking "The author clearly
forgot which section this command was in and
failed to return to the text to replace these
question marks...".  OTOH, a dash is more of a
"declarative" statement -- "section undefined".

[I suspect this issue has only been encountered
by folks writing documentation?]


       
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