Re: man prints binary characters to the screen.

[James Youngman]

On Thu, Feb 03, 2005 at 04:39:41PM -0800, Thomas Herter wrote:
> With this setting of TERM and with this Linux version:
> 
>   stnsp013:/home/therter> set | grep TERM
>   TERM=vt100
>   stnsp013:/home/therter> uname -a
>   Linux stnsp013 2.4.21-15.ELsmp #1 SMP Thu Apr 22 00:18:24 EDT 2004 i686 
> i686 i386 GNU/Linux
> 
> man formatted pages contain often strange binary characters.
> Like here, from 'man stty':
> 
> [...
>        * [-]ctlecho
>               echo control characters in hat notation (???^c???)
> ...]
> 
> In some cases these characters cause that telnet session needs to
> be reset or even terminated.

As far as I can see, they are not binary characters:-

address@hidden:~$ env | grep TERM
TERM=vt100
COLORTERM=gnome-terminal
address@hidden:~$ man stty | grep "hat notation" | od -c
Reformatting stty(1), please wait...
0000000                                                           e   c
0000020   h   o       c   o   n   t   r   o   l       c   h   a   r   a
0000040   c   t   e   r   s       i   n       h   a   t       n   o   t
0000060   a   t   i   o   n       (   `   ^   c   '   )  \n
0000075

By my reckoning, the characters are 0x60 anf 0x27, which are both
7-bit ASCII.  These are passed straight through from the manpage
source:-

$ zcat /usr/share/man/man1/stty.1.gz | grep "hat notation"  | od -c
0000000   e   c   h   o       c   o   n   t   r   o   l       c   h   a
0000020   r   a   c   t   e   r   s       i   n       h   a   t       n
0000040   o   t   a   t   i   o   n       (   `   ^   c   '   )  \n
0000057

Do you have value set for $LANG or $LC_* which is causing this,
perhaps?

Regards,
James.