[PATCH] Use proper grave accent character

Sébastien Peterson-Boudreau <[email protected]> Mon, 1 Jun 2026 01:53:06 -0300
Newsgroups org.kernel.vger.dash
Message-ID <[email protected]>
In the troff(7) (may be groff(7) on your system) input language, the
ascii grave accent (backtick) character is interpreted as a left
typographers quotation on output devices that support it. Likewise, a '
is interpreted as a right quotation.

IOW, if your terminal supports unicode (along with some other
variables..),

	`command`

in dash.1 can end up being displayed as

	‘command‘

which is not the input the shell expects, and so a user following
examples in the manual will be very confused.

The way to typeset the grave accent character as it most likely
appears on your keyboard, the character the shell expects for command
expansion, you must use the troff character \(ga
---
 src/dash.1 | 6 +++---
 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

diff --git a/src/dash.1 b/src/dash.1
index dbc34c9..f651a03 100644
--- a/src/dash.1
+++ b/src/dash.1
@@ -293,12 +293,12 @@ Enclosing characters within double quotes preserves the literal
 meaning of all characters except dollarsign
 .Pq $ ,
 backquote
-.Pq ` ,
+.Pq \(ga ,
 and backslash
 .Pq \e .
 The backslash inside double quotes is historically weird, and serves to
 quote only the following characters:
-.Dl $  `  \*q  \e  \*[Lt]newline\*[Gt] .
+.Dl $  \(ga  \*q  \e  \*[Lt]newline\*[Gt] .
 Otherwise it remains literal.
 .Ss Reserved Words
 Reserved words are words that have special meaning to the
@@ -983,7 +983,7 @@ or
 version
 .Pc :
 .Pp
-.Dl `command`
+.Dl \(gacommand\(ga
 .Pp
 The shell expands the command substitution by executing command in a
 subshell environment and replacing the command substitution with the
-- 
2.54.0