On Sun, Nov 20, 2022 at 08:09:13PM +0100, Tomasz Rola wrote: > On Sun, Nov 20, 2022 at 01:32:54PM -0000, Christian Weisgerber wrote: > > On 2022-11-20, Reuben mac Saoidhea <ancatm...@outlook.com> wrote: > > > > >> It is a builtin, so it is documented inside ksh. > > > > > > i think the 4.3BSD manual allowed for example `man while' for `man sh'? > > > > FreeBSD has a builtin(1) man page that attempts to list the csh(1) > > and sh(1) builtins and points to the respective man pages: > > > > https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=builtin > > > > It's an attempt to do something about this problem, but I think the > > result isn't that great. > > I am writing this from ParrotOS (Debian derivative) and since I am > avid user of bash, I can do "man bash-builtins" and it prints me a > very nice looking summary. Bash package version is 5.1-2+deb11u1, > which probably means 5.1 with some Debian-specific addons. >
the thing is, you have to be aware of a builtins page in order to know to type "man builtins" (or whatever). you would need to know that a command is a builtin. but if you know it's a builtin, then you can just type "man ksh" and get the documentation. we could add all these commands to ksh's NAME, but that would look awful. i think it's just a case of we should expect people to familiarise themselves with the shell they're using, and know to go digging there. openbsd does not generally have undocumented commands, so it's all there somewhere. jmc
