Re: Quoting Hell in Manual Pages, or lintian problem?
Marc Haber <mh+debian-mentors@zugschlus.de> writes:
> How would I quote backslashes in a manual page correctly?
See https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=966803#14:
if you want to *emit* a backslash, use \e.
> Currently I have the source:
>
> with '"' around each argument, each '"'
> in the string converted to '\\"' and each '\\' in the string
> converted to '\\\\'.
>
> This renders to:
>
> with '"' around each argument, each '"'
> in the string converted to '\"' and each '\' in the string
> converted to '\\'.
>
> which looks reasonable enough.
>
> However lintian doesn't like this and flags the construct with
> "acute-accent-in-manual-page". Is this a bug in Lintian?
Lintian is honorably losing against nroff here. I wouldn't dare to
correct it either. However, if you want to use single quotes in your
manual pages, note that ' as the first character of the line is active,
which is bound to catch you when you least expect it. They are
extremely quirky anyway, although Debian killed off at least some of
that quirkyness on its own turf. I recommend \(oq\e\e\(cq to get two
backslashes between (proper) single quotes. Sorry.
--
Regards,
Feri
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