Why do some bash built-ins (such as dirs, pushd or help) don't have manual entries?
3 Answers
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.
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>
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"
man builtins
...help dirs