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Stéphane Chazelas
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If you add a | sed -n l to that tail command, to show non-printable characters, you'll probably see something like:

N\bNA\bAM\bME\bE 

That is, each character is written as X Backspace X. On modern terminals, the character ends up being written over itself with no difference. But in ancient tele-typewriters, that would cause the character to appear in bold as it gets twice as much ink.

Still, pagers like more/less do understand that format to mean bold, so roff, and that's still what roff does to output bold text.

Some man implementations would call roff in a way that those sequences are not used, and don't invoke a pager when they detect the output is not going to a terminal (so man bash | grep NAME would work there), but not yours.

You can use col -b to remove those sequences (there are other types (_ BS X) as well for underline).

Stéphane Chazelas
  • 586.3k
  • 96
  • 1.1k
  • 1.7k