docs/123010: Misleading Documentation

[Andrew Wright]

>Number:         123010
>Category:       docs
>Synopsis:       Misleading Documentation
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       non-critical
>Priority:       medium
>Responsible:    freebsd-doc
>State:          open
>Quarter:        
>Keywords:       
>Date-Required:
>Class:          doc-bug
>Submitter-Id:   current-users
>Arrival-Date:   Wed Apr 23 12:20:01 UTC 2008
>Closed-Date:
>Last-Modified:
>Originator:     Andrew Wright
>Release:        7.0
>Organization:
>Environment:
All architectures -- documentation issue only.
>Description:
The gzip(1) man page could do with a little clarification when it comes to gzcat.

In particular, I expected the following two constructions to do the same thing:
   gzcat *.gz | command
   cat *.gz | gzcat | command

They don't -- it seems that gzcat expects each argument to be a separate compressed archive whose contents are then concatenated together; the second of course expects the concatenation of the set of provided files to be a single archive (which in this case was my expectation of both).

While this is fine functionality, a note to this effect on the man page certainly couldn't hurt.  Right now there is no discussion whatsoever about how gzcat (or in fact "zcat" as it is referred to there) handles multiple files. 
>How-To-Repeat:
n/a -- documentation issue
>Fix:
Doc issue only.

>Release-Note:
>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted: