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PunjCoder
PunjCoder

Reputation: 470

What does the ellipsis (...) mean in man pages

I was reading the ln man page and came across the following SYNOPSIS.

ln [-Ffhinsv] source_file ... target_dir

What does symbol ... above mean?

Upvotes: 9

Views: 3756

Answers (1)

Lev Levitsky
Lev Levitsky

Reputation: 65791

That means a repeatable argument (source_file).

From man man:

The following conventions apply to the SYNOPSIS section and can be used
as a guide in other sections.

bold text          type exactly as shown.
italic text        replace with appropriate argument.
[-abc]             any or all arguments within [ ] are optional.
-a|-b              options delimited by | cannot be used together.

argument ...       argument is repeatable.
[expression] ...   entire expression within [ ] is repeatable.

According to the man page, calling ln like that will create links for all source files in the target directory e.g. ln file1 file2 file3 target-dir/.

Upvotes: 21

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