man -t ls converts - to −. Is there a way I can tell man -t to not do that?
I prefer having -, as the - is often part of examples where − would be wrong (e.g. options).
asked Mar 30, 2017 at 17:13
1 Answer
In the original file, the minus '-' symbols really are backslashified to '\-' which would then be interpreted in the way you do not like.
A solution is to filter the file before feeding it to man for formatting:
zcat /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.gz | man -tl - > ls-normal.ps
zcat /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.gz | sed 's/\\-/-/g' | man -tl - > ls-minus.ps
The second form replaces the '−'s with '-'s on my system.
PS: My previous answer was wrong - apologies!
-
1@Ned64 +1 — the root cause is that in
troff,\-encodes "minus" (which is appropriate for options, and produces output which can be copy-pasted to the command-line), whereas-encodes "hyphen".groffnow treats both in the same way for text output (and HTML, at least in Debian), but apparently not for PostScript. Mar 30, 2017 at 18:38
(echo '.tr \--'; zcat $(man -w ls)) | man -tl -