Re: [PATCH] man/man3/getopt.3: Restore angle brackets.

G. Branden Robinson
2025-12-19T16:25:09Z

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Hi Alex,

At 2025-11-27T13:12:26+0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 26, 2025 at 10:54:59PM -0800, Collin Funk wrote:
> > Alejandro Colomar <alx@kernel.org> writes:
> > > On Tue, Nov 25, 2025 at 08:05:24PM -0600, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > >> At 2025-11-25T17:15:39-0800, Collin Funk wrote:
> > >> > While looking at 'man -S 3 getopt' the underlining under PID
> > >> > looked strange to me.
> > >
> > > The underlining under 'PID' means that it's a variable part. We
> > > use that syntax in many pages. This is documented in
> > > groff_man(3), as Branden said.
> > >
> > > However, you might have also noticed some dotted underline that
> > > extends until the end of the line. I think that's a bug somewhere
> > > --might be in the terminal emulator, because I see it in
> > > xfce4-terminal(1) but not in xterm(1)--.
> >
> > I was using Gnome terminal and Emacs '(man "getopt.3")'.
>
> Hmmm, I can reproduce the dotted underline in gnome-terminal(1) too.
> I don't know where's the bug. It might be in both. Branden, can you
> have a look at it? I guess you'll know better than me about these
> issues.

The dotted underline is how gnome-terminal(1) marks a hyperlink. The
man page source explicitly formats this text as a hyperlink.

MP> .P
MP> Very old versions of glibc were affected by a
MP> .UR https://\:sourceware.org/\:git/\:?p=glibc.git;a=commitdiff;h=bf079e19f50d64aa5e05
MP> .BI _ PID _GNU_nonoption_argv_flags_
MP> environment variable
MP> .UE .

I observe a few cases of failure to protect literals from hyphenation in
this page, include the aforementioned literal.

Very old versions of glibc were affected by a _PID_GNU_nonop‐
tion_argv_flags_ environment variable.

I'll prepare a patch.

Regards,
Branden