A request to segregate man pages for shell built-ins

[Thomas Mueller]

from Manish Jain:

> Despite all the respect I have for the genius of Richard Stallman, I
> could never understand what use was his idea of info - man pages are
> what everyone needs, and nothing else.

> But I run into roughly the same weather with shell built-ins, most of
> which do not have their own man page. 'man set' rather blandly throws up
> the man page for the shell, and it takes an immense effort to glean the
> relevant information.
        
> Is it not possible to create separate man pages for the shell built-ins
> too ? Or at least ensure that invoking the built-in with --help gets the
> necessary information ?

> (Note : some built-ins (e.g. 'test') do have their own man pages)

I agree, info is a bummer, html would be better, but man works on the base system with no web browser, you don't even need lynx or elinks.

There is a pinfo port.  Konqueror in KDE had a good info viewer.  But still, sticking with man makes more sense.

If you run man on a shell builtin and get the man page for the shell, you can search through the man page on the desired command.

Tom