Debian bug report logs - #956
TERM=dumb man 1 biff | col -b produces odd trailing output

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From mdd.comm.mot.com!mitchell Wed Jun  7 08:54:29 1995
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Date: Wed, 7 Jun 95 08:52:48 PDT
From: mitchell@mdd.comm.mot.com (Bill Mitchell)
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To: debian-bugs@pixar.com, iwj10@cus.cam.ac.uk
Subject: Re: Bug#956: TERM=dumb man 1 biff | col -b  produces odd trailing output

iwj10@cus.cam.ac.uk (Ian Jackson) said:

> chiark:~> TERM=dumb man biff | col -b | cat -v | tail -4 [...]
> 37;1HK
> [...]
> The 37;1HK looks like a mangled vt100 escape sequence.  I'm not sure
> how it got there, but it doesn't belong.

It looks like a bug in /etc/termcap to me.

The first 0.93R5 /etc/termcap entry is "console|con80x25|dumb: [...]"

"dumb" doesn't belong here.  "dumb" should be considerably dumber
than "console".

IMHO, "con80x25" doesn't belong here either, but that's another story)

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Date: Wed, 7 Jun 95 01:47 BST
From: iwj10@cus.cam.ac.uk (Ian Jackson)
To: Debian bugs submission address <debian-bugs@pixar.com>
Subject: TERM=dumb man 1 biff | col -b  produces odd trailing output

Package: groff? biff? man?
Version: groff 1.09, biff 5.3-4, man 1.5-1

chiark:~> TERM=dumb man biff | col -b | cat -v | tail -4
     The biff command appeared in 4.0BSD.

4th Berkeley Distribution       March 14, 1991                          1
37;1HK
chiark:~> tail -4 /usr/man/man1/biff.1 
The
.Nm
command appeared in 
.Bx 4.0 .
chiark:~> 

The 37;1HK looks like a mangled vt100 escape sequence.  I'm not sure
how it got there, but it doesn't belong.

(My shell is bash, where  <VAR>=<value> <command>  executes <command>
with environment variable <VAR> set to <value>.)

Ian.