Do you have man pages with garbled type? I’m working on a multi-threaded file watcher that searches for patterns in files and executes commands on a match. In order to release it into the wild, I need documentation. That means man pages. So I’m viewing my man pages and I see crap like this: ’-f /path/file’

Those are supposed to be single-quotes, i.e., apostrophes.

For this project, I’m building my man pages from perl PODs with Pod::Man. In case you’d like to do the same, here’s a handy utility for making man pages from perl pods. It converts POD data to *roff.

#!/usr/bin/perl
# A Pod::Man example script
#
use Pod::Man;
my $input = $ARGV[0] or barf();
my $output = $ARGV[1] or barf();

my $parser = Pod::Man->new (release => $VERSION, section => 8);
$parser->parse_from_file ($input, $output);

sub barf() {
  print "usage: $0 <file.pod> <file.1>n";
  exit(1);
}

When I saw the garbled text above, I suspected a problem with my method. It turns out that wasn’t the case at all. The culprit was my character set. My language was set to en_US.UTF-8 but my terminal didn’t support that character set. If you’re having a similar problem, you can check your character set with this command:

$ set | grep -i lang
LANG=en_US.UTF-8

The fix is easy:

export LANG=en_US

Add that to your .profile to make it permanent.