#1043351 ebtables: unescaped hyphens in manpage

Package:
ebtables
Source:
ebtables
Description:
Ethernet bridge frame table administration
Submitter:
Linus Lüssing
Date:
2026-02-18 21:13:02 UTC
Severity:
normal
#1043351#5
Date:
2023-08-09 11:27:53 UTC
From:
To:
Dear Maintainer,

I tried running the following ebtables command, but got an error:

```
$ sudo ebtables -I INPUT -i veth1 -j mark ‐‐mark-set 0x42
ebtables v1.8.9 (nf_tables): Bad argument : '‐‐mark-set'
```

On #netfilter IRC people with eagle-eyes and apparently a different font
than me pointed out that I was trying to use Unicode instead of ASCII
hyphens. Changing the command to use "--mark-set", with ASCII hyphens,
instead helped.

It seems I copied the Unicode version from the ebtables manpage. I believe
it's a similar issue to this one:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1043309

That is un-escaped hyphens in the manpage source code are rendered to
Unicode hyphens.

To fix this the hyphens should be escaped in the manpage source code.

Regards, Linus

(Kudos to @aiyion@infosec.exchange on Mastodon who pointed me to the
curl Debian bug report and by that to the origin of my issue.)


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#1043351#10
Date:
2026-02-18 21:11:04 UTC
From:
To:
Control: affects -1 iptables

This problem also affects iptables, since the ebtables-nft man-page is
almost identical.

J.