Why does "man x-terminal-emulator" return the output of "man gnome-terminal"?
I know what x-terminal-emulator
is and does, but I don't understand why there isn't exist a special manual page for it instead to be redirected to the manual page of gnome-terminal
. I would like to see a manual page explaining what x-terminal-emulator
exactly does and in that page a reference to man gnome-terminal
.
Is this correct (if yes, then why, for example, the output of man dir
doesn't return the output of man ls
)? It is there a good motivation behind this fact?
x-terminal-emulator
is a virtual package. The terminal emulator is configured by Debian's alternative system.
On Ubuntu you can easily follow this symlink construction, e.g. for gnome-terminal:
$ which x-terminal-emulator
/usr/bin/x-terminal-emulator
$ ls -lF /usr/bin/x-terminal-emulator
/usr/bin/x-terminal-emulator -> /etc/alternatives/x-terminal-emulator*
$ ls -al /etc/alternatives/x-terminal-emulator
/etc/alternatives/x-terminal-emulator -> /usr/bin/gnome-terminal.wrapper*
Now regarding the man pages, update-alternatives
also links the man page of gnome-terminal
to x-terminal-emulator
as explained in the update-alternatives
manual:
It is often useful for a number of alternatives to be synchronized, so that they are changed as a group; for example, when several versions of the vi(1) editor are installed, the man page referenced by /usr/share/man/man1/vi.1 should correspond to the executable referenced by /usr/bin/vi. update-alternatives handles this by means of master and slave links; when the master is changed, any associated slaves are changed too. A master link and its associated slaves make up a link group.
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