On 2026-02-04 12:03, Thomas Wolff via Cygwin wrote:
Am 04.02.2026 um 18:10 schrieb Brian Inglis via Cygwin:
On 2026-02-04 02:56, Vincent via Cygwin wrote:
My request is related to an issue I opened in the FLAC Github :
https://github.com/xiph/flac/issues/861
After some investigations, the issue is related to the build release of the
FLAC package provided by Cygwin : the man pages of flac(1) and metaflac(1)
use the HYPHEN (U+2010 ) character instead of the HYPHEN-MINUS (U+002D)
character.
These two commands expect HYPHEN-MINUS character, so if you copy-paste the
man page options in your terminal, it will fail.
Example : flac ‐‐version
will return an error : « can't open input file ‐‐version: No such file or
directory », because of « ‐‐version » with HYPHEN copied-pasted from the
man pages.
The right string is « --version » with HYPHEN-MINUS (U+002D).
Example : flac --version
will return : « flac 1.5.0 »
Please, feel free to read the issue in Github (
https://github.com/xiph/flac/issues/861 ) for more details, as it's easier
to read code and quotes with the markdown formatting.
This is a very pretty nasty kind of bug, because it's very difficult to
distinguish HYPHEN-MINUS and HYPHEN in a terminal. It's also very difficult
to figure out why the command has failed, as the « No such file or
directory » is not the root cause of the problem.
I think a new build release to fix this, would be very welcome.
Thank you very much for your time and your great work. :)
It’s really a nuisance that man (presumably gnu man, but I don’t remember the
details of a previous discussion) changed interpretation of some important
characters into „glyphs“ that some witty people thought to be nice but are
completely non-functional.
It applies not only to „-“ but also to „~“. Look at `man bash` and search for
bashrc and you'll see the tilde symbol replaced by an ugly superscript „small
tilde“. Why??
Package maintainers are forced to adapt their man pages and either replace all
occurrences of these characters by corresponding escapes or apply these two
global tricks per man page:
.char ^ \(ha
.char - \N'45'
It appears to be a consequence more of groff -man being upgraded to produce
better quality typographic output more consistently with other macro packages,
output devices, and more comprehensive font, character, and glyph sets, while
not penalizing the other existing macro packages originally designed and
intended to produce quality output: see groff(7), groff_rfc1345(7), and
groff_char(7), for example:
"The developers of AT&T /troff/ chose mappings for them that would be useful for
typesetting technical literature in a broad range of scientific disciplines
...
Keycap Appearance and meaning Special character and meaning
" " neutral double quote \[dq] neutral double quote
' ’ closing single quote \[aq] neutral apostrophe
- ‐ hyphen \- or \[-] minus sign/Unix dash
\ (escape character) \e or \[rs] reverse solidus
^ ˆ modifier circumflex \(ha circumflex/caret/“hat”
` ‘ opening single quote \(ga grave accent
~ ˜ modifier tilde \(ti tilde"
Really this tension between compatibility with tty input and basic/draft and
typographic quality output has existed since the earliest days of computerized
text formatting and typesetting with various levels of higher quality output
devices from dot matrix, daisy wheel, phototypesetter, electrostatic, laser, and
higher quality rendering devices.
[Note: \N'#' refers to the current output font glyph index *NOT* an input code.]
Upstream sources seems to provide only .md man sources and no b-r package for
conversion (pandoc unavailable from Cygwin) so man pages are generated for the
upstream sources, and this conversion generates man page options with plain
text hyphen-minus, which are treated by man as normal text *hyphen* `‐` not
plain text *minus* `-`.
In man pages you use escaped hyphen-minus `\fB\-v\fR` to treat them as minus
text `-` as used in options `-v`.
We see this use of unescaped hyphens in the upstream tar files, below, so
please complain upstream about their man page generation, and reopen their issue:
```
$ wget https://mirror.../x86_64/release/flac/flac-1.5.0-1-src.tar.xz
$ tar -xvf flac-1.5.0-1-src.tar.xz
flac-1.5.0-1.src/
flac-1.5.0-1.src/flac-1.5.0.tar.xz # upstream sources
flac-1.5.0-1.src/FLAC.cygport
$ tar -xvf flac-1.5.0-1.src/flac-1.5.0.tar.xz flac-1.5.0/man/{,meta}flac.1
flac-1.5.0/man/flac.1
flac-1.5.0/man/metaflac.1
$ grep -m5 '\\f[[{]\?B[]}]\\\?-' flac-1.5.0/man/{,meta}flac.1
flac-1.5.0/man/flac.1:\f[B]-\f[R] \f[I]\&...\f[R] ]
flac-1.5.0/man/flac.1:\f[B]flac\f[R] [ \f[B]-d\f[R] | \f[B]--decode\f[R] |
\f[B]-t\f[R] |
flac-1.5.0/man/flac.1:\f[B]--test\f[R] | \f[B]-a\f[R] | \f[B]--analyze\f[R] ] [
flac-1.5.0/man/flac.1:\f[I]infile.ogg\f[R] | \f[B]-\f[R] \f[I]\&...\f[R] ]
flac-1.5.0/man/flac.1:\f[B]-d\f[R], analysis with \f[B]-a\f[R] or testing with
\f[B]-t\f[R].
flac-1.5.0/man/metaflac.1:\f[B]-o\f[R] \f[I]filename\f[R]\f[B], --output-
name=\f[R]\f[I]filename\f[R]
flac-1.5.0/man/metaflac.1:\f[B]--preserve-modtime\f[R]
flac-1.5.0/man/metaflac.1:\f[B]--with-filename\f[R]
flac-1.5.0/man/metaflac.1:\f[B]--no-filename\f[R]
flac-1.5.0/man/metaflac.1:\f[B]--no-utf8-convert\f[R]
```
--
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis Calgary, Alberta, Canada
La perfection est atteinte Perfection is achieved
non pas lorsqu'il n'y a plus rien à ajouter not when there is no more to add
mais lorsqu'il n'y a plus rien à retrancher but when there is no more to cut
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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