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Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2026 13:56:54 +0100
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Subject: Re: [FLAC 1.5.0-1] Man pages use HYPHEN character instead of
 HYPHEN-MINUS.
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From: Thomas Wolff via Cygwin <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
Reply-To: Thomas Wolff <towo AT towo DOT net>
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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 <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com> 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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