Someone at RedHat (apparently Dale Lovelace) thought it would be a good idea to remove the ^H characters from the bash-doc files. Here is the relevant changelog entry: * Fri Sep 14 1999 Dale Lovelace <dale> - Remove annoying ^H's from documentation What Dale obviously doesn't realize is that the ^H characters are there to provide bold type and make the documentation read like a man page (with syntax highlighting and such). Stripping those ^H characters makes all the text plain and harder to read. This was also a problem in 6.x
Fixed in 2.04-13. (Delayed because I wanted to give dale a chance to comment on this).