Hi Branden, I was going to replace some unmatched double quote as argument to a man(7) macro, which was used as a literal double quote in the output, by the more readable (less ambiguous in source code) \[dq].
However, I've realized that groff(1) seems to treat them slightly
differently. Is this intentional, or a bug?
Here are the source-code diff, and the formatted diff:
$ git diff;
diff --git i/man/man3/cfree.3 w/man/man3/cfree.3
index 55008e9a7..1698ab6e3 100644
--- i/man/man3/cfree.3
+++ w/man/man3/cfree.3
@@ -80,7 +80,7 @@ .SS 3-arg cfree
to free memory allocated with
.BR calloc (3),
or do I need
-.BR cfree ()?"
+.BR cfree ()?\[dq]
Answer: use
.BR free (3).
.P
$ MANWIDTH=64 diffman-git;
--- HEAD:man/man3/cfree.3
+++ ./man/man3/cfree.3
@@ -58,7 +58,7 @@ DESCRIPTION
A frequently asked question is "Can I use free(3) to
free memory allocated with calloc(3), or do I need
- cfree()?" Answer: use free(3).
+ cfree()?" Answer: use free(3).
An SCO manual writes: "The cfree routine is provided for
compliance to the iBCSe2 standard and simply calls free.
I think the behavior with '"' makes more sense than with '\[dq]'. Maybe
some conditional within groff(1) checks for '"' but forgets to check for
the synonymous '\[dq]'?
Have a lovely night!
Alex
--
<https://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
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