git/list[1] front-page[2] threads[3] people[4] search[5] about
 

Re: quote in help code example

From
Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch>
Date
Oct 15, 2009, 12:02 UTC
Message-ID
<200910151402.56295.trast@student.ethz.ch>
In-Reply-To
<200910132215.46840.trast@student.ethz.ch>
Thomas Rast wrote:
Show 6 quoted lines
> 
> The patch below just replaces said template with a no-op for git's
> manpage creation.  I have not been able to substantiate the claim that
> apostrophes are special, and in fact with the patch my manpages look
> fine.  Then again I don't know anything about roff syntax either, and
> manuals seem a bit hard to come by.

Actually, scratch the patch. I haven't been able to nail it yet, and I'm not sure I have the energy for another stab at this mess; but during testing with older versions, I learned that they behave differently and the patch just shifts the breakage a bit.

Also, the single quotes are apparently special at the beginning of a line and to delimit function arguments, though not elsewhere. The bash manpage uses \(aq to get a literal apostrophe, which I will aim to convert them to. Oddly enough, the groff(7) manpage does not document \(aq, but lists \(cq as the official escape for ' ... which then turns out to mutate into this cursed non-apostrophe again. Sigh.

-- 
Thomas Rast
trast@{inf,student}.ethz.ch
Previous: Thomas RastNext: Thomas Rast
Message 8 of 18 in “quote in help code example”
  1. bill lamOct 12, 2009
  2. Miklos VajnaOct 12, 2009
  3. bill lamOct 13, 2009
  4. Miklos VajnaOct 13, 2009
  5. bill lamOct 13, 2009
  6. Miklos VajnaOct 13, 2009
  7. Thomas RastOct 13, 2009
  8. Thomas RastOct 15, 2009
  9. Quote ' as \(aq in manpagesThomas Rast, Oct 21, 2009
  10. Miklos VajnaOct 21, 2009
  11. Anders KaseorgOct 21, 2009
  12. Quote ' as \(aq in manpagesThomas Rast, Oct 21, 2009
  13. Document GNU_ROFF in MakefileMiklos Vajna, Oct 21, 2009
  14. Junio C HamanoOct 21, 2009
  15. Anders KaseorgOct 21, 2009
  16. Quote ' as \(aq in manpagesThomas Rast, Oct 22, 2009
  17. Anders KaseorgOct 21, 2009
  18. Junio C HamanoOct 12, 2009

Read the whole thread, see it on lore, or plain text.

$ cat FOOTERMessages come from the public archive at lore.kernel.org/git, fetched every hour. The front page is chosen and written each morning by an AI editor and can be wrong; the threads themselves are the record. About and API. For agents: an MCP server at https://gitlist.dev/mcp, and any thread, story or person page as Markdown by adding .md to its URL (or sending Accept: text/markdown). Details in /llms.txt.