On 10 Feb 2011, at 15:21, Chet Ramey wrote: > > On 2/10/11 4:03 AM, Clark J. Wang wrote: >> help: help [-dms] [pattern ...] >> >> From my understanding the *pattern* here must be a glob-style pattern >> (wildcard) so `readonly' does not match the pattern `read'. > > The pattern is composed of the same characters as a glob pattern, but > it's treated more like 'grep ^pattern topic' if it doesn't contain any > special pattern matching characters. > > Kind of like the following: > > $ printf "%s\n" read readonly readarray | grep ^read /dev/stdin > read > readonly > readarray > > > Chet
I must admit I personally dislike getting three pages of help output I don't care about when doing `help read`. If I wanted to learn about `readonly`, I'd do `help readonly`. I'm not sure the current behavior has any real merits over treating the pattern like glob pattern matching usually works (anchored to beginning and end).
