many of the man pages shipped with redhat 6.1 and 6.2 are buggy.  They do not escape the necessary output modification codes so the groff interpreting the pages reads the codes.  For example, look at the output of "man printf".  First of all, the codes exhibited in the page itself are interpreted, thus their listing is garbled.look at the section beneath the string "interpreted sequences are:".  Secondly, when you exit the manual page there are several errors on the screen:

<standard input>:44: a newline character is not allowed in an escape name
<standard input>:47: a newline character is not allowed in an escape name
<standard input>:56: cannot use newline as a starting delimiter
<standard input>:59: warning: numeric expression expected (got `N')

I have also noticed this behavior in the man page for echo.  

I couldn't find thisanywhere in the existing bugs.  this behavior doesn't exist in 5.x, but I have reproduced it on 6.x machines on multiple hardware platforms with multiple configurations.

-deborah