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Message-ID: <2eb7528d-babd-4bc8-9c0d-b2f77499a627@towo.net>
Date: Wed, 4 Feb 2026 20:03:07 +0100
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Subject: Re: [FLAC 1.5.0-1] Man pages use HYPHEN character instead of
 HYPHEN-MINUS.
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
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Precedence: list
From: Thomas Wolff via Cygwin <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
Reply-To: Thomas Wolff <towo AT towo DOT net>
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Errors-To: cygwin-bounces~archive-cygwin=delorie DOT com AT cygwin DOT com
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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'

Thomas

>
> 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]
> ```
>
> [pasted upstream also but can not reopen issue!]
>


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