On 2/26/21 23:32, Reuti wrote:
I noticed some formatting issues in the man page of `tail`, and I wonder
whether they are intentional as they occur at some places. They happen up to
version 8.32:
line: "-c, --bytes=[+]NUM" the "[" is in italic: \fB\-c\fR,
\fB\-\-bytes\fR=\fI\,[\/\fR+]NUM
line: "-f, --follow[={name|descriptor}]" the "[=" is in bold: \fB\-f\fR,
\fB\-\-follow[=\fR{name|descriptor}]
line: "-n, --lines=[+]NUM" the "[" is "[" is in italic: \fB\-n\fR,
\fB\-\-lines\fR=\fI\,[\/\fR+]NUM
I'm not a `groff` expert, but the sequence "\,some-text\/" appears a couple of times. What effect
does it have for the formatting as the "," and "/" are not output?
Thanks for the bug report. Those lines are automatically generated by
help2man, so I'm cc'ing this to bug-help2...@gnu.org and will close the
coreutils bug report.
The problem is that "tail --help" outputs this:
-c, --bytes=[+]NUM output the last NUM bytes; or use -c +NUM to
output starting with byte NUM of each file
-f, --follow[={name|descriptor}]
output appended data as the file grows;
an absent option argument means 'descriptor'
-F same as --follow=name --retry
-n, --lines=[+]NUM output the last NUM lines, instead of the
last 10;
or use -n +NUM to output starting with
line NUM
and help2man transforms that into:
.TP
\fB\-c\fR, \fB\-\-bytes\fR=\fI\,[\/\fR+]NUM
output the last NUM bytes; or use \fB\-c\fR +NUM to
output starting with byte NUM of each file
.TP
\fB\-f\fR, \fB\-\-follow[=\fR{name|descriptor}]
output appended data as the file grows;
.IP
an absent option argument means 'descriptor'
.TP
\fB\-F\fR
same as \fB\-\-follow\fR=\fI\,name\/\fR \fB\-\-retry\fR
.TP
\fB\-n\fR, \fB\-\-lines\fR=\fI\,[\/\fR+]NUM
output the last NUM lines, instead of the last 10;
or use \fB\-n\fR +NUM to output starting with line NUM
