>From most, shells, e.g. bash, dash, most or all POSIX shells, you can type: type name_of_command And it'll generally tell you what/where that command comes from, or if it's an alias, etc. E.g. from either bash or dash: $ type cd cd is a shell builtin $ So then you could look it up in the relevant man page. In this case, either bash or dash. But your issue isn't with cd, but characters special to the shell, and how the shell parses commands, and (your lack of) quoting. So, read the bash (or dash) man page about that. If you want to start somewhat simpler, rather than read the quite length bash man page, start with something relevant that it's mostly backwards compatible with, e.g. dash (1224 lines of text, vs. 6021 for bash), or POSIX shell: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3_chap02.html Or even start with ye olde Borne shell from 1979 (a mere 6 pages): https://www.mpaoli.net/~michael/unix/sh/
So ... not a corner case, but how Bourne and relatively compatible shells have generally been parsing commands for well over four decades now. On Wed, Nov 27, 2024 at 3:38 AM Richard Owlett <rowl...@access.net> wrote: > I've used terminal commands for so many decades I don't know where to > look up fine details of a specific commands. > I just tried to use the cd command with a target directory having spaces > in it's name. Of course the system responded > > bash: cd: too many arguments > Problem solved. But is there somewhere to go directly without a web search?
