Follow-up Comment #18, bug #67372 (group groff): To support (belated, retroactive) future design work on an ancient groff feature that has been only partially designed and implemented for a long time, i have run
$ grep -ER '(^|[^\\])\\[*ABbCDFfgHhkLMmNnOoESsVvwXxYZ]\\' * on a few manual page trees. The intent of the regex is to find real-world examples of escape sequences that (optionally or mandatorily) take delimited arguments and that have the beginning of another escape sequence right after the function character, but only if this occurs after a non-backslash character or at the beginning of an input line. The "but only" restriction is essential to suppress noise because abuse of "\\" where the traditional "\e" or the modern "\[rs]" is intended is extremely widespread (not so much in OpenBSD base, but almost anywhere else). There are no matches in OpenBSD base, Xenocara, FreeBSD 14.2 base, or NetBSD 10.1 base. But there are several hundred matches even in the few ports i happen to have installed, so likely thousands in the ports tree as a whole. gnutls-serv(1) contains: [...] .ie t \ .ds B-Font [CB] .ds I-Font [CI] .ds R-Font [CR] .el \ .ds B-Font B .ds I-Font I .ds R-Font R .TH gnutls-serv 1 "09 Jul 2025" "3.8.10" "User Commands" .SH NAME \f\*[B-Font]gnutls-serv\fP \- GnuTLS server .SH SYNOPSIS \f\*[B-Font]gnutls-serv\fP .\" Mixture of short (flag) options and long options [\f\*[B-Font]\-flags\f[]] [\f\*[B-Font]\-flag\f[] [\f\*[I-Font]value\f[]]] [\f\*[B-Font]\-\-option-name\f[][[=| ]\f\*[I-Font]value\f[]]] [,,,] I don't think that code is doing what the manual page authors seem to hope it would be doing, but it clearly intends to interpolate the "[" argument delimiter into an \f sequence. The same idiom is present in ocsptool(1), p11tool(1) and several other pages in the gnutls package. Judging from https://gitlab.com/gnutls/gnutls/-/blob/master/doc/manpages/Makefile.am , they are using https://gitlab.com/gnutls/cligen to generate the man(7) code. Apparently, not to be confused with https://github.com/clicon/cligen nor with https://github.com/c-blake/cligen nor with https://pypi.org/project/cligen/ . But i'd be somewhat surprised if the gnutls folks were the only ones doing something like that. I wouldn't expect much of the kind in mdoc(7) documents, but likely more in man(7) documents. _______________________________________________________ Reply to this item at: <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?67372> _______________________________________________ Message sent via Savannah https://savannah.gnu.org/
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