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Date:	Sun, 8 Mar 2009 02:47:10 -0800
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Subject:	Re: doc suggestions for User Guide's "Special filenames", including `cat /proc/partitions`
From:	S Page <skierpage AT gmail DOT com>
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Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> Can you please check against the latest documentation under
> http://www.cygwin.com/1.7/cygwin-ug-net/using-specialnames.html
> and see if it explains anything better in this regard?

The "POSIX devices" section is much the same.

> If not, I'm open to suggestions to make the documentation clearer,

I provided 7 specific suggestions in my message, I hope someone can
eventually act on them.  I don't know SGML well, and the 130 minutes I
spent figuring out and composing them is more time than I intended to
spend on this.  Sorry.
(An 8th suggestion; consider allowing comments on online doc pages,
like http://php.net/manual/ or Adobe LiveDocs .)

I early wrote
> I also ran into a glitch where any and every variation of
> `df /dev/sdXN` gives information for my first partition,
D'oh of course. `df /path/to/some/file` gives info on the partition
holding that file, and all /dev files are in the same directory on the
same partition.  I couldn't figure out a way in cygwin to get more
info about a disk or partition from its /dev/ entry.  A command like
`od -c /dev/sdb6 | head -3` will give an error if a partition or disk
does not exist.

Regards,
--
=S Page

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