I tried to read the manpage of salt(7). troff crashes with signal 6, leaves a core file. But the man(1) command report an exit status 0. It shouldn’t, better use status 2 or something similar. $ man -M ~/man salt >/dev/null; echo $? grotty:<standard input> (<standard input>):1266315: character above first line discarded troff: Failed assertion at line 510, file `/usr/src/gnu/usr.bin/groff/src/roff/troff/../../../../../../contrib/groff/src/roff/troff/input.cpp'. grotty:<standard input> (<standard input>):1994486:warning: no final `x stop' command groff: troff: Signal 6 (core dumped) 0 groff(1) correctly reports an error and an exit status 2: $ zcat ~/man/man7/salt.7.gz | groff >/dev/null 2>&1; echo $? 2
I think the problem is in the function line 456: 456 eval "$cattool $manpage | $pipeline" 457 ret=$? we are checking only the status of the last command, which is the $PAGER (e.g. less(1)) eval '/usr/bin/zcat /home/wosch/man/man7/salt.7.gz | tbl | groff -S -P-h -Wall -mtty-char -man -Tascii -P-c | less' and ignore the exit status of groff (and tbl, zcat - any command in the pipeline) The bash has an option to fail on pipe errors $ set -o pipefail unfortunately, our /bin/sh implementation does not have this feature. There are workaround for shell which don’t check the pipe status, as described in https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/14270/get-exit-status-of-process-thats-piped-to-another (((((exec 3>&- 4>&-; someprog); echo $? >&3) | filter >&4) 3>&1) | (read xs; exit $xs)) 4>&1 but this looks bizarre and you have to do it for every command in the pipe line.
sh now has pipefail, but you do need the additional logic from my commit message to ignore SIGPIPE exits because pagers may exit before reading all their input. This additional logic is definitely simpler than the logic to pass through exit status without pipefail, though.
A commit in branch main references this bug: URL: https://cgit.FreeBSD.org/src/commit/?id=14a5c1068d3751173dc41f3097b12e95791b2160 commit 14a5c1068d3751173dc41f3097b12e95791b2160 Author: Wolfram Schneider <wosch@FreeBSD.org> AuthorDate: 2024-04-20 08:24:58 +0000 Commit: Wolfram Schneider <wosch@FreeBSD.org> CommitDate: 2024-04-20 08:30:33 +0000 man: do not ignore the exit status of roff tools PR: 223516 Approved by: emaste, bapt Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D44798 usr.bin/man/man.sh | 8 +++++++- 1 file changed, 7 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)