Hyphens and Other Manpage Typography, 4/4: literal ASCII hyphens.

Hyphens and Other Manpage Typography, 4/4: literal ASCII hyphens.

From: Peter Samuelson <peter@p12n.org>

nroff formats "-" as the very short hyphen used for hyphenated terms
and for splitting a word across two lines.  When you want a literal
ASCII "-", like for typing on a command line, you're supposed to use
"\-" instead.

Yeah, it sounds pedantic, but it actually makes a difference.  With
modern Unicode-capable terminals, "man" actually renders these with
different characters, so if you try to search for "--create" in your
favorite pager, you won't find it unless the nroff source says
"\-\-create".  This discrepancy doesn't generally show up with
non-Unicode terminals.

Signed-Off-By: Peter Samuelson <peter@p12n.org>