No representation without identification

I couldn’t understand why

'export -f which'

in .bashrc was erroring, with

'bash: export: ‐f: not a valid identifier'.

I had copied and pasted from ‘man which’.

I finally checked the byte value of ‘-’ without really thinking, or expecting that What You See Is NOT What You Get, though I’ve had that experience with the characters on the screen not being the ones I thought I was seeing before.

Turns out ‘man which’ was giving me,

<‐> 8208, Hex 2010, Oct 20020, Digr -1

not

<->  45,  Hex 2d,  Octal 055.

Syntax highlighting changed with the change, showing that was my answer.

A particular instance of a general problem reading computer output.

Me at

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