There was a time where the man pages on Debian(derived) were being mangled by groff. Groff made a change that when an author typed - (hypen-minus), it would be

There was a time where the man pages on Debian(derived) were being mangled by groff. Groff made a change that when an author typed - (hypen-minus), it would be empitted as ‐ (hypen). In order to actually display a hypen-minus, it would need to be entered as \-. We can argue about what is semantically the right way of displaying dashes, but because the majority of existing manpages don't properly escape the dash, this change broke searching in manpages. You couldn't do /--location (search, hypen-minus, hypen-minus, ..., <enter>). https://lwn.net/Articles/947941/ https://lwn.net/Articles/947941/