Oops, I just mistakenly attributed Ingo's earlier reply to Edgar. Apologies to both, and thanks very much for the help.
Ian On 30/06/2019, ropers <rop...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 30/06/2019, Edgar Pettijohn <ed...@pettijohn-web.com> wrote: >>>> Then you need to say (...snip; see earlier email...) > > Thank you. That contained several useful hints I hadn't even figured > out I could look for there, although this too seems obvious in > retrospect. Maybe I'm not thinking about these things carefully enough > in advance. :) > >>> This is perfectly fine, exactly as it should be: >>> >>> schwarze@isnote $ man bash >>> man: No entry for bash in the manual. >>> schwarze@isnote $ pkglocate bin/bash | head -n1 >>> bash-5.0.7p0:shells/bash:/usr/local/bin/bash >>> >>> > To end on a positive: Can I add how much I appreciate that OpenBSD >>> > hard-links help(1) to man(1), >>> >>> Heh; deraadt@ did that on Sep 14, 1998 for OpenBSD 2.4 ... >>> >>> > and that man will default to `man help` when called as help? >>> >>> and aaron@ added the help(1) manual page on Oct 18, 1999 >>> for OpenBSD 2.6. >>> >>> > This elegant way of having OpenBSD respond to `help` is really >>> > n00b-friendly. >>> >>> And yet, even among those tiny innovations that are somehow neat, >>> not all get picked up elsewhere: >>> >>> https://man.openbsd.org/FreeBSD-12.0/help >>> https://man.openbsd.org/NetBSD-8.0/help >>> https://man.openbsd.org/Linux-5.01/help > > In bash, `help` is a shell builtin and does do something, though IMO, > the something that it does isn't initially as helpful as OpenBSD's > help(1), especially to newbies. [1] > > However, what it does do, i.e. > * print a list of bash builtins in response to `help`, or > * print bash builtin-specific help in response to `help [builtin]` > could well be helpful later and relates to what we discussed earlier. > Is man(1) plus info(1) plus bash's help some kind of triple > book-keeping or wheel-reinvention? Perhaps, but in terms of > convenience, bash's `help` and `help [builtin]` are stiff competition > to Edgar's earlier hints of `man -k Ic,Nm=[term]` and `man -O > tag=[term]`. > Don't get me wrong; I'm VERY grateful for the hints, and I don't think > I have or know of an ideal solution. All the same, I think this is > still an area where considerable possibility for user confusion yet > abounds. > > Ian > > footnote: > [1] This also means that if an OpenBSD sysadmin tries to be "helpful > to newbies" by installing the bash they're maybe used to, they will by > default clobber access to OpenBSD's excellent help(1), and it would > take extra care to re-enable that and to then figure out a nice way to > still provide access to bash's builtin help too... aaargh! Maybe bash > on OpenBSD isn't the best choice really. >
