Re: bash man page and FreeBSD mandoc

[Chet Ramey]

On 4/29/24 12:43 PM, David Ongaro wrote:
> Chet Ramey writes:
>
> > On 12/22/18 12:49 AM, Derek Schrock wrote:
> > > On Fri, Dec 21, 2018 at 09:59:16AM EST, Chet Ramey wrote:
> > > > This is a macro redefinition fix for an old bug in the BSD and Ultrix man
> > > > macros. We can try removing it, since there probably aren't any remaining
> > > > systems using them.
> > >
> > > Ok, I see that whole block is related to the comment.  So the fix here
> > > would be to remove lines 14 to 38 not just removing the characters?
> >
> > Yes. The fixed version of that macro still lives on in the Solaris 10
> > man macros, but the broken ones are probably all gone.
>
> As of now I can still see these control characters included in the man
> page of a current bash version (GNU bash, version 5.2.26(1)-release
> (aarch64-apple-darwin23.2.0)). 

They're commented out, and troff will ignore them. It looks like mandoc
has a problem with characters that should be ignored because they
appear in a commented line. I'd say that's a bug in mandoc.

I suppose we can work around it.
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/