[oi-dev] Weird man page construction

[Udo Grabowski (IMK)]

On 18/02/2019 13:27, Udo Grabowski (IMK) wrote:
> On 18/02/2019 13:00, Peter Tribble wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Feb 18, 2019 at 11:36 AM Udo Grabowski (IMK) <udo.grabowski at kit.edu
>> <mailto:udo.grabowski at kit.edu>> wrote:
>>
>>     Hi,
>>
>>     I was wondering for a while now why I could not grep man pages anymore,
>>     like 'man ftp|grep netrc', which was working a couple of OI versions
>>     before.
>>
>>
>> Try something like
>>
>> man ftp | col -x -b | grep netrc
>>
>> to strip the formatting.
>
> Thanks, that really helps !
>
>>
>>
>>     Today I really got curious and found these weird constructions
>>     in the man page output 'man ftp|od -tc'
>>
>>     0121460  \b   ~   /  \b   /   .  \b   .   n  \b   n   e  \b   e   t  \b
>>     0121500   t   r  \b   r   c  \b   c  \n  \n   A  \b   A   T  \b   T   T
>>
>>     That means: most of the characters are backspaced and written again !
>>     Checked a couple of man pages, most of them have these useless
>>     sequences in them, so grepping man pages is mostly impossible now.
>>

ok, not *that* useless, as overprinting via backspace seems to be
not only a common technique for printers to get bold characters,
but also gets interpreted by less and more in that way.
-- 
Dr.Udo Grabowski   Inst.f.Meteorology & Climate Research IMK-ASF-SAT
http://www.imk-asf.kit.edu/english/sat.php
KIT - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology           http://www.kit.edu
Postfach 3640,76021 Karlsruhe,Germany T:(+49)721 608-26026 F:-926026

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