On Fri, 28 Jan 2022, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>
>                                 I suggest to step through the code in
> Man-parse-man-k and see what happens there.
>

I will do that.

Some more observations:

# outside GNU Emacs on the NetBSD command prompt
'''
% man -k awk
awk (1)   pattern-directed scanning and processing language
awk is the Bell Labs' implementation of the AWK programming language as described in the The AWK Programming Language by A. V. Aho, B. W. Kernighan, and P. J. Weinberger. awk scans each input file for lines that match any...

awk (1)   pattern-directed scanning and processing language
...are global. Thus local variables may be created by providing excess parameters in the function definition. /src/cmd/awk A. V. Aho, B. W. Kernighan, P. J. Weinberger, The AWK Programming Language, Addison-Wesley, 1988.  ISBN 0-201-07981-X

English (3)       use nice English (or awk) names for ugly punctuation variables
use nice English (or awk) names for ugly punctuation variables

'''

# inside GNU Emacs on NetBSD
# M-x man RET -k awk RET
# *Man -k awk* buffer shows
'''
[1]   Segmentation fault      man -k awk 2>/dev/null |
       Done                    sed -e "/^[^A-^Z][^A-^Z]*\$/d" -e "//s///g" ... |
       Done                    awk "
  BEGIN { blankline=0; anonblank=0; }
  /^... 
'''

# inside GNU Emacs on GNU/Linux
# you can only type the following
# M-x man RET -k-awk
# that dash between "k" and "a" is forced in

-- 
vl