Hi James,

I like all the recent manpage improvements, thanks!

On 7/8/26 10:09, James Youngman wrote:
On Tue, Jul 7, 2026 at 7:56 AM Bernhard Voelker
<[email protected]> wrote:
man swallows the "" as an empty second argumment to .B syntax.
I propose using the following instead:

    .B \-E \*(lq\*(rq

Thanks for spotting the problem.  I actually used \[dq]\[dq] so that
people can copy the text from the manpage (i.e. the output of "man
xargs") into a shell script and get the intended effect.

Good point!

BTW: Looking into the STANDARDS CONFORMANCE section, we have already -E '' with:
  .B \-E \*'\*'
Would you prefer single-quotes over double-quotes here for consistency?


I've pushed the attached trivial patch to avoid 'make check-all-manpages' 
errors.

Have a nice day,
Berny

From c239984c8c79e5e5137019142bdd2f1f03c6d918 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Bernhard Voelker <[email protected]>
Date: Wed, 8 Jul 2026 22:19:19 +0200
Subject: [PATCH] maint: avoid check-all-manpages errors

'make check-all-manpages' complains:
  troff:./xargs.1:155: warning: macro '"' not defined
  an.tmac:./xargs.1:571: style: blank line in input

* xargs/xargs.1: Fix comment start.
Eliminate blank line.
---
 xargs/xargs.1 | 10 +++++-----
 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)

diff --git a/xargs/xargs.1 b/xargs/xargs.1
index ab0fa7c0..e140581f 100644
--- a/xargs/xargs.1
+++ b/xargs/xargs.1
@@ -152,10 +152,10 @@ Other implementations of
 .B xargs
 may have a default logical end-of-file string, so if you want to
 portably ensure that no logical end-of-file string is in use, use
-." \[dq] below is a neutral double-quote, reflecting the use of this
-." punctuation in shell code.  \*(lq\*(rq would produce a left and right
-." double-quote, and so would not give the intended effect if the user
-." copies the text into a shell script.
+.\" \[dq] below is a neutral double-quote, reflecting the use of this
+.\" punctuation in shell code.  \*(lq\*(rq would produce a left and right
+.\" double-quote, and so would not give the intended effect if the user
+.\" copies the text into a shell script.
 .B \-E \[dq]\[dq]
 to disable the logical end-of-file string.
 See also STANDARDS CONFORMANCE.
@@ -568,7 +568,7 @@ This section describes the relationship between GNU
 .B xargs
 and the standards with which it complies.  Some portability
 considerations are mentioned.
-
+.
 .SS OPTIONS
 Options specified in IEEE Std 1003.1, 2024 are
 .BR \-E ,
-- 
2.54.0

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