The important point is that after \", everything to the end of the line is ignored, including the ^G.

You should probably file a bug report with apple, then.

You omitted the portion of the file that contains the actual commented-out macro definition in question:

.\" .de }1
.\" .ds ]X \&\\*(]B\\
.\" .nr )E 0
.\" .if !"\\$1"" .nr )I \\$1n
.\" .}f
.\" .ll \\n(LLu
.\" .in \\n()Ru+\\n(INu+\\n()Iu
.\" .ti \\n(INu
.\" .ie !\\n()Iu+\\n()Ru-\w^G\\*(]X^Gu-3p \{\\*(]X
.\" .br\}
.\" .el \\*(]X\h^G|\\n()Iu+\\n()Ru^G\c
.\" .}f
.\" ..

If mandoc isn't treating the undefined request followed by a comment by ignoring the entire line, it needs to be fixed.

comment #4:

> MacOS X is still using a version of bash that was released over 15 years ago. This particular change (commenting out the definition) was made about three years ago, back in December of 2018.
>
> So, the version of the man page on macos is the one from 2006, which still has the ^G in the macro definition.
>
> I can't really do anything about that; Apple will remove bash completely before they ship a version that uses GPLv3.

Thanks for looking. I guess maybe the bug is in OSX's implementation of `man` then?

I tried running `man bash` and then while less was still displaying the text, I checked `ps auxwww | grep man` to see the commandline that was running. It is:

sh -c (cd "/usr/share/man" && (echo ".ll 10.8i"; echo ".nr LL 10.8i"; /bin/cat '/usr/share/man/man1/bash.1') | /usr/bin/tbl | /usr/bin/groff -Wall -mtty-char -Tascii -mandoc -c | (/usr/bin/less -is || true))

Pretty verbose, I stripped off a bit and just ran

(echo ".ll 10.8i"; echo ".nr LL 10.8i"; cat '/usr/share/man/man1/bash.1') | tbl | groff -Wall -mtty-char -Tascii -mandoc -c | less

Which displayed the manpage without barfing anything to the console. I wish I was smart enough to know where the problem is.

I am the submitter of this report, it was not intended to be anonymous. But, I can't seem to get registered at savannah. Not receiving the activation emails.