> > Since any code extracts, C, shell, etc., often already need > > manipulation, perhaps because they contain the escape > > character, it's these that should use \` and \', e.g. > > > > $ grep \'foo\\.bar\' \`find -name \'xxx.*\'\` > > Agreed -- except that \' won't work -- you need \(aq, because > \' renders to an acute accent -- but this did originally work > for older troff, when the apostrophe and acute accent were one > and the same.
I don't believe acute accent and apostrophe were ever considered to be the same in troff. What you're seeing in the old documents is simply a hack to obtain a glyph visually distinct from the apostrophe/quote of the roman font. Even at that time I think it would have been preferable to use a "terminal" font for code fragments, which, however, was not available because of technical limitations.
