Am 05.02.2026 um 12:11 schrieb Backwoods BC via Cygwin:
On Wed, Feb 4, 2026 at 3:23 PM Dr Bean via Cygwin <[email protected]> wrote:
On Wed, 04 Feb 2026, Brian Inglis via Cygwin wrote:
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]
```
--
My experience with the man page of `which`, which
mirrors that of Vincent with FLAC
http://drbean.sdf.org/LooksLikeHyphen.html
My experience is that this is a problem pretty much everywhere on the
'Net. Long ago I wrote a simple filter script to remove all
non-printing characters and CR and LF from the clipboard contents and
put the result back into the clipboard. I then display the contents
for a few seconds before closing the window. This won't properly deal
with Unicode in the copied data, but at least you can see that the
data is bogus.
As a Cygwin newbie long ago, I was constantly getting errors because
of spurious CR characters in copied text. Sometimes it was completely
non-obvious that this was the problem and it wasn't until I started
using my filter script regularly that I stopped getting mysterious
errors.
If someone wanted to write a clipboard "purifier" that would
de-Unicode and de-HTML the data, I'd be forever grateful. I wouldn't
have a clue how to go about this myself.
This isn't the issue. I don't think you'd want your clipboard contents
mangled from what you copied.
The problem discussed here is what `man` provides for copying in the
first place.
Revised my workaround for man page maintainers:
.char - \-
.char ^ \(ha
.char ~ \(ti
And you may add these or keep their special layout:
.char ` \(ga
.char ' \(aq
Thomas
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