On Thu, 10 Feb 2011, Maarten Billemont wrote:
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
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).
I totally agree.
--
Chris F.A. Johnson, <http://cfajohnson.com/>
Author:
Pro Bash Programming: Scripting the GNU/Linux Shell (2009, Apress)
Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (2005, Apress)
