Quoting Branden:
*roff escape sequences may sometimes look like C escapes, but that
is misleading. *roff is in part a macro language and that means
recursive expansion to arbitrary depths.
You can get away with "\\" in a context where no macro expansion
is taking place, but try to spell a literal backslash this way in
the argument to a macro and you will likely be unhappy with
results.
Try viewing the attached file with "man -l".
"\e" is the preferred and portable way to get a portable "escape
literal" going back to CSTR #54, the original Bell Labs troff
paper.
groff(7) discusses the issue:
\\ reduces to a single backslash; useful to delay its
interpretation as escape character in copy mode. For a
printable backslash, use \e, or even better \[rs], to be
independent from the current escape character.
As of groff 1.22.4, groff_man(7) does as well:
\e Widely used in man pages to represent a backslash output
glyph. It works reliably as long as the .ec request is
not used, which should never happen in man pages, and it
is slightly more portable than the more exact ‘\(rs’
(“reverse solidus”) escape sequence.
People not concerned with portability to extremely old troffs should
probably just use \(rs (or \[rs]), as it means "the backslash
glyph", not "the glyph corresponding to whatever the current escape
character is".
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Quoting Branden:
*roff systems will interpret the period in the unpatched
page as sentence-ending punctuation and put inter-sentence
spacing after it. (This might not be visible on
nroff/terminal devices, but it is more likely to be on
typesetter/PostScript/PDF output).
groff_man(7) in groff 1.22.4 attempts to throw man page
writers a bone here:
\& Zero‐width space. Append to an input line to prevent
an end‐of‐ sentence punctuation sequence from being
recognized as such, or insert at the beginning of an
input line to prevent a dot or apostrophe from being
interpreted as the beginning of a roff request.
Reported-by: Bjarni Ingi Gislason <bjarniig@rhi.hi.is>
Reported-by: G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Drawn from Documentation/filesystems/sysfs.txt, P. Mochel's OLS
paper, and some naive investigation.
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Just a skeleton page so far, but perhaps it will be filled out
over time.
Reported-by: Mark Wielaard <mark@klomp.org>
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>