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This askubuntu question identifies/locates the " ` " key on the keyboard, and discusses its use in window switching.

This question addresses the use of backticks for the shell.

However, why is the backtick used in combination with a single quote in man pages (e.g. in the 2nd or 3rd paragraph down in the fstab man page, `like such.'). Is it related to HTML formatting, similar to how backticks are used on this forum to format code examples?

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  • @kos: I don't think it's duplicate as this question is not only about the shell. Jan 18, 2016 at 1:01
  • @kos Yes, that answers the heart of my question, thank you. I tried pretty hard to find an answer to this question before posting, but couldn't find this thread. However, why would the backtick appear with a single quote in manpages?
    – Life5ign
    Jan 18, 2016 at 1:11
  • @kos in the fstab man page, a couple paragraphs down, under the heading "The first field." I tried to blockquote it here, but it got all messed up due to the backticks themselves. No I can't see that button for the problem solution btw..where did it go?
    – Life5ign
    Jan 18, 2016 at 1:19
  • Possible duplicate of Why do Unix man pages use double backticks in place of double quotes?
    – bain
    Jan 18, 2016 at 1:30
  • @quest There is no single quote in the fstab man page, perhaps it is a locale issue on your system - e.g. Problem with single quotes in man pages and Character sets for man pages
    – bain
    Jan 18, 2016 at 1:34

1 Answer 1

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The use of different symbols for opening and closing quote is just a common typographic style. See Wikipedia: Quotation mark - Electronic documents - Typewriters and early computers:

Typographically, there are two types of quotation marks:

'…' and "…", are known as neutral, vertical, straight, typewriter, or "dumb" quotation marks. The left and right marks are identical.

‘…’ and “…”, are known as typographic, curly, curved, or book quotes. The left (start) and right (end) forms are different, resemble small figures six and nine raised above the baseline (like 6…9 and 66…99), but then solid, i.e., with the counters filled. In many typefaces, the shapes are the same as those of an inverted (upside down) and normal comma.

The second ‘…’ typographic style is the one used in man pages.

A similar style is used for double quotes in Latex, except the ` and ' characters are repeated twice to signify the double quote:

``You were a little grave,'' said Alice.

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  • OK I finally understand U&L article above ("Why do Unix man pages...") about pre-ASCII character sets only having one "single quote" character, which was used to represent any glyph that looked like a single quote. So did the manpage authors make a stylistic choice and literally type a backtick and a single quote `like such', or did the manpages get rendered incorrectly by modern computers?
    – Life5ign
    Jan 18, 2016 at 2:22
  • It was a style choice to literally type backtick and single quote. Do zless /usr/share/man/man5/fstab.5.gz and you will see the source code of the man page, written in troff, which GNU made a clone of called groff. For details of the source language read An Introduction to the GNU Groff Text Processing System. This was all invented before HTML, which is one of the reasons it may seem a little archaic now...
    – bain
    Jan 18, 2016 at 2:32
  • Got it, that makes sense. In other words, pre-ASCII, there used to only be one digital representation mapping to all the variations of a "single quote" glyph (e.g. ' ` " etc.); nowadays, these variations all have their own digital representation in ASCII/UTC, so in order to preserve the old stylistic quotation `like such,' we must use a combination of different digital character representations.
    – Life5ign
    Jan 18, 2016 at 2:33

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