The following behavior occurs in OS X (10.9.5) with the BSD utils, but not Linux (Ubuntu 15.10) with the GNU utils.OS X: $ man -v man, version 1.6cLinux: $ man --version man 2.7.4I'm trying to write a shell script to automatically parse the supported options for a given program for use in bash/tcsh autocompletion. For instance here's the name and synopsis section output by name perl when viewed in the terminal.$ man perl | catNAME       perl - The Perl 5 language interpreterSYNOPSIS       perl [ -sTtuUWX ]      [ -hv ] [ -V[:configvar] ]            [ -cw ] [ -d[t][:debugger] ] [ -D[number/list] ]            [ -pna ] [ -Fpattern ] [ -l[octal] ] [ -0[octal/hexadecimal] ]            [ -Idir ] [ -m[-]module ] [ -M[-]'module...' ] [ -f ]            [ -C [number/list] ]      [ -S ]      [ -x[dir] ]            [ -i[extension] ]            [ [-e|-E] 'command' ] [ -- ] [ programfile ] [ argument ]...$ man perl > /tmp/perl.outI first got suspicious when$ </tmp/perl.out awk '/SYNOPSIS/ {print}'didn't print any lines, then I opened the file in vi and saw this. Why the heck are there so many unnecessary duplicated characters and ^H characters.N^HNA^HAM^HME^HE       perl - The Perl 5 language interpreterS^HSY^HYN^HNO^HOP^HPS^HSI^HIS^HS       p^Hpe^Her^Hrl^Hl [ -^H-s^HsT^HTt^Htu^HuU^HUW^HWX^HX ]      [ -^H-h^Hhv^Hv ] [ -^H-V^HV[:_^Hc_^Ho_^Hn_^Hf_^Hi_^Hg_^Hv_^Ha_^Hr] ]            [ -^H-c^Hcw^Hw ] [ -^H-d^Hd[t^Ht][:_^Hd_^He_^Hb_^Hu_^Hg_^Hg_^He_^Hr] ] [ -^H-D^HD[_^Hn_^Hu_^Hm_^Hb_^He_^Hr_^H/_^Hl_^Hi_^Hs_^Ht] ]
Redirecting output of `man ` to file produces file with tons of `^H` characters on OS X
osx;man