[wearing the groff maintainer hat]
The bash manpage has source: [\fBtime\fP [\fB\-p\fP]] [ ! ] \fIcommand\fP [ [\fB|\fP\(bv\fB|&\fP] \fIcommand2\fP ... ]
Well... `bv' is not the optimal character, but the number of choices are quite limited if you want to stay compatible.
that produces: [time [-p]] [ ! ] command [ [|⎪|&] command2 ... ] - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - ^ Which *may* look right on your display or not
The char over my carat, that seems to be what "(bv" in the source is being mapped to, is a U+23AA, which is a full-height vertical line used in box-drawings.
It stuck out because 2/3 of my displays showed a "�" or empty box for that char.
Obviously, 2/3 of your displays don't support utf-8 well. Some possibilities: 1. your display font has just a too small character repertoire, or 2. your fallback fonts don't have a sufficiently large character repertoire, or 3. you have not properly configured your terminals, using the wrong character encoding, for example latin-1
It doesn't seem to be that common, not to mention *semantically incorrect*. It would be better, I think, if the software matched "(bv" to a presentation form for a vertical bar.
The very problem is that character `\(bv' (in the original troff documentation you can find this is the abbreviation for `bold vertical') is intended for building up vertically oversized brackets and braces. A similar character is `\(br' (`box rule') which doesn't fit the semantical meaning either. The correct character to use would be `\(or'. However, this maps to the normal vertical bar which the bash people obviously tried to avoid.
Presuming that half-width is preferable over full-width, (though it may not make a difference, now that I think about it) to use U+FFE8, "￨" -- a half-width light vertical bar that is taller than 0x7f (at least in the fonts I am seeing it with). Putting the logical or in the middle with the halfwidth vertical light on either side of it: looks like (with a few repeats): "￨|￨ ￨|￨ ￨|￨ ￨|￨".
I think that `bv' is a good choice for this very special situation in the bash manpage. In case you can't stand the appearance, feel free to adjust the used character either in the file `man.local' or in `troffrc', for example by appending .if '\*[.T]'utf8' \ . char \[bv] \N'65512' which maps `\(bv' to U+FFE8 if the output device produces utf-8. Werner