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Why do some bash built-ins (such as dirs, pushd or help) don't have manual entries?

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  • try man builtins...
    – MattDMo
    Jan 16, 2014 at 20:48
  • for help with bash builtins, help dirs Jan 16, 2014 at 20:51
  • They have, what are you trying?
    – Braiam
    Jan 17, 2014 at 0:38
  • 1
    Close-voters: This is both clear and can be answered factually and objectively (and has been). In particular, answers explaining where the help is located clarify the organizational system used for manpages, which is the fundamental crux of this question. They also address what appears to be the fundamental need of the asker. Jan 17, 2014 at 8:08

3 Answers 3

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They have. It is man bash or man builtins. Bash is the software so it has the manual where its commands are explained. We shouldn't have a manual for every command we can give in a software. E.g ftp has some same commands like bash(e.g cd ) or same command like a binary (ls), that would be very bad to make a manual for all of these. And I didn't talked about other shell's builtins.

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There is

man bash-builtins

they are also documented in

man bash

The reason they don't have manpages like man help is likely because of possible confusion with other shell's builtins or a command by the same name.

I generally find this to be adequate. Both the manpages above are rather long and hard to navigate.

help <command>
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To jump directly to the SHELL BUILTINS COMMANDS section of the bash man page, I define the following alias in my $HOME/.bash_aliases file.

alias man-builtin="man -P 'less -p ^SHELL\ BUILTIN\ COMMANDS' bash"

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