Bug 682857

Summary:	backslash-period escape does not work
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Ville Skyttä <ville.skytta>
Component:	groff	Assignee:	Jan Vcelak <jvcelak>
Status:	CLOSED CURRENTRELEASE	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	unspecified	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	17	CC:	jvcelak, tsmetana
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	Unspecified
OS:	Unspecified
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:	groff-1.22.1-1.fc18	Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2013-01-12 00:14:56 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Ville Skyttä 2011-03-07 19:39:22 UTC

$ rpm -q groff
groff-1.20.1-3.fc14.x86_64

From the groff(7) man page:

| Single-Character Escapes
|     \.     An uninterpreted dot (period), even at start of line.

(See also the first bullet point in "CONTROL CHARACTERS".)

However, it doesn't seem that the this escape works as documented, assuming I understand how to use it correctly.  Reproducer:

$ cat t.man
foo
\.bar
quux

$ groff -Tascii -wmac ./t.man | head -n 1
./t.man:2: warning: macro `bar' not defined
foo quux

I think the output should have been "foo .bar quux" and no warning.

Comment 1 Jan Vcelak 2011-06-17 13:24:32 UTC

According to upstream response, this is an expected behavior. And it should be fixed in manual page.

Comment 2 Ville Skyttä 2012-05-16 19:53:38 UTC

It seems that it's still unfixed in the man page as of groff 1.21-8.fc17.  I'm wondering what _is_ the way to get uninterpreted dots at start of line if \. is not it?

Comment 3 Jan Vcelak 2012-05-17 10:35:05 UTC

Sorry for that. I still do not know what exactly is the correct behavior and what should be stated in the manpage. I will need to search some old roff documentation.

You can take a look at following threads:
http://www.mail-archive.com/bug-groff@gnu.org/msg01499.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2011-03/msg00025.html

One possible way of printing dot at the beginning of the line is this:
groff -Tascii -wmac <<< '\[char46]foo' | head -1

But I think there is also another escape sequence.

Comment 4 Fedora Update System 2013-01-01 16:22:14 UTC

groff-1.22.1-1.fc18 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 18.
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/groff-1.22.1-1.fc18

Comment 5 Jan Vcelak 2013-01-01 16:22:45 UTC

Resolved in:
groff-1.22.1-1.fc18
groff-1.22.1-1.fc19

Comment 6 Fedora Update System 2013-01-01 21:42:15 UTC

Package groff-1.22.1-1.fc18:
* should fix your issue,
* was pushed to the Fedora 18 testing repository,
* should be available at your local mirror within two days.
Update it with:
# su -c 'yum update --enablerepo=updates-testing groff-1.22.1-1.fc18'
as soon as you are able to.
Please go to the following url:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2013-0023/groff-1.22.1-1.fc18
then log in and leave karma (feedback).

Comment 7 Fedora Update System 2013-01-12 00:14:58 UTC

groff-1.22.1-1.fc18 has been pushed to the Fedora 18 stable repository.  If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.