A request to segregate man pages for shell built-ins

[Polytropon]

On Wed, 25 Oct 2017 14:49:26 +0100, Rafal Lukawiecki wrote:
> For what it is worth, I would have found this segregated access to man for shell built-ins very useful in the last two months, as I have been rapidly re-skilling from bash/Linux to sh/FreeBSD. I spent too much time browsing the net while, ideally, most of it could have come from man.
> 
> Anything that makes it easier to get up to speed with sh is going
> to make FreeBSD more accessible, especially to those coming from
> bash, in my opinion.
> 
> However, it is also quite useful to have a single, long document
> on sh, which is capable of covering the more general issues such
> as variable scope and flow control. I wonder if there is a risk
> that a segregated approach could remove that important benefit.

This probably could be solved by incorporating shell-specific
sections and "SEE ALSO" into the manpages which already exist
for external commands (e. g., "man test"), and adding new pages
for builtins (one could be "man for" or "man while" where there
is a difference in sh/bash and csh syntax and usage). The general
coverage provided by "man sh", "man csh" or "man bash" should not
be distributed among "little man pages", as this also makes searching
for context problematic (simply because what you're searching for
is in another manpage, not in the one you validly used as an entry
point).



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...