Re: Escaping whitespace

["Alejandro Colomar (man-pages)" <alx.manpages@gmail.com>]

On 1/8/21 12:29 PM, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:
> Hi Alex,
> 
> On Thu, 7 Jan 2021 at 18:11, Alejandro Colomar (man-pages)
> <alx.manpages@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Michael,
>>
>> On 1/6/21 1:51 PM, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:
>>> Hi Alex,
>>>
>>> On 1/5/21 10:56 PM, Alejandro Colomar (man-pages) wrote:
>>>> Hi Michael,
>>>>
>>>> While having a look at your latest commits,
>>>> I saw that there's a bit of inconsistency in escaping whitespace
>>>> (existing previous to the commit):
>>>>
>>>> Sometimes it's [!\ (], and sometimes it's [! (].
>>>
>>> Thanks for prodding me about this.
>>>
>>> Yes, it's inconsistent. And given the use of .nf/.fi
>>> around the text blocks, escaping the spaces serves no
>>> purpose. So I made a more radical fix; see commit
>>> 5c10d2c5e299011e34adb568737acfc8920fc27c
>>
>> Nice!
>>
>> After your following commit (422d5327a88fa89394100bafad69b21e50b26399),
>> I found that there are many such cases.  Just [[grep -rnI '\\ ' man?]]
>> and you'll see.  Some of them are valid, but a lot of them aren't.
> 
> Can you point me at some examples?

A sample:

man3/envz_add.3:61:.RI ( *envz ,\  *envz_len )
<< this should be two lines
man3/xdr.3:184:.IR "long\ *" .
<< unnecessary
man3/scandir.3:277:.IR "const void\ *" .
<< unnecessary and self-inconsistent
man5/proc.5:1350:.RI ( "readelf\ \-l" ).
<< unnecessary
man7/symlink.7:424:.I "rm\ \-r slink directory"
<< unnecessary and self-inconsistent
man7/feature_test_macros.7:492:.IR "cc\ \-std=c99" ).
<< unnecessary
man8/ld.so.8:313:.IR "readelf\ \-n"
<< unnecessary

Maybe I'm missing something?

Thanks,

Alex

> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Michael
> 

-- 
Alejandro Colomar
Linux man-pages comaintainer; https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/