uutils / uutils/coreutils

Missing information in the man page for tr

Open Beginner friendly
#14,688 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

U - tr
Dominant language
Rust
Stars
24.1k
Forks
2k
Avg merge
1d 5h
Merged PRs (30d)
365

Description

The man page for tr has the following synopsis:

SYNOPSIS
       tr  [-c|--complement]  [-d|--delete]  [-s|--squeeze-repeats] [-t|--trun‐
       cate-set1] [-h|--help] [-V|--version] [sets]

The man page describes these options, but not [sets]. There is no information whatsoever on what these sets are, and no examples of how to use tr. It feels like a large portion of the man page is missing?

I first noticed this when upgrading to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS from 24.04 (and thus switching to the Rust coreutils).

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Locate the source for the tr man page and review its synopsis and option descriptions. Document what [sets] means and add examples showing how to use tr; done when the page explains the set arguments and includes practical usage examples.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
cli, documentation
Issue type
Documentation
Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Activity status
Active
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
72/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.