I am not sure when this was introduced but I have only noticed it after recent updates which included the 240 kernel.

/usr/man/man1/dig.1.gz formatting is badly broken. It appears to be related to this RedHat bug report from 2016. Here they lay blame on the version of docbook-style-xsl used to generate the man page.

A quick search did not turn up anything more recent, which is not to say there is none.

For anyone immediately affected, you can decompress and open the file, globally remove all leading spaces and tabs at beginning of lines and save it.

I suspect there must be a patch but my patch-foo is wanting, or perhaps Pat may adjust the dockbook version.

Apologies if this is already known here, the LQ search is not very useful these days.

Off zero reply list then...

The following is a command-line solution corresponding to astrogeek's English language solution.


1. From a directory other than /usr/man/man1 issue the following shell command:

gunzip -c /usr/man/man1/dig.1.gz | sed 's/^[[:space:]][[:space:]]*\././' | gzip > dig.1.gz


2. Check the results:

man ./dig.1.gz


3. If the results are satisfactory then - as root - overwrite the original bad file:

mv ./dig.1.gz /usr/man/man1/dig.1.gz


The "sed" argument above was plagarized from Michal Jaegermann's post at:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1413395

3 members found this post helpful.

Thank you for posting the sed command! The resulting manpage is immensely improved. :-)

This upstream commit seems to be the culprit.