Oops, I just mistakenly attributed Ingo's earlier reply to Edgar.
Apologies to both, and thanks very much for the help.
Ian
On 30/06/2019, ropers <ropers@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 30/06/2019, Edgar Pettijohn <edgar@pettijohn-web.com> wrote:
>>>> Then you need to say (...snip; see earlier email...)
>
> Thank you. That contained several useful hints I hadn't even figured
> out I could look for there, although this too seems obvious in
> retrospect. Maybe I'm not thinking about these things carefully enough
> in advance. :)
>
>>> This is perfectly fine, exactly as it should be:
>>>
>>> schwarze@isnote $ man bash
>>> man: No entry for bash in the manual.
>>> schwarze@isnote $ pkglocate bin/bash | head -n1
>>> bash-5.0.7p0:shells/bash:/usr/local/bin/bash
>>>
>>> > To end on a positive: Can I add how much I appreciate that OpenBSD
>>> > hard-links help(1) to man(1),
>>>
>>> Heh; deraadt@ did that on Sep 14, 1998 for OpenBSD 2.4 ...
>>>
>>> > and that man will default to `man help` when called as help?
>>>
>>> and aaron@ added the help(1) manual page on Oct 18, 1999
>>> for OpenBSD 2.6.
>>>
>>> > This elegant way of having OpenBSD respond to `help` is really
>>> > n00b-friendly.
>>>
>>> And yet, even among those tiny innovations that are somehow neat,
>>> not all get picked up elsewhere:
>>>
>>> https://man.openbsd.org/FreeBSD-12.0/help
>>> https://man.openbsd.org/NetBSD-8.0/help
>>> https://man.openbsd.org/Linux-5.01/help
>
> In bash, `help` is a shell builtin and does do something, though IMO,
> the something that it does isn't initially as helpful as OpenBSD's
> help(1), especially to newbies. [1]
>
> However, what it does do, i.e.
> * print a list of bash builtins in response to `help`, or
> * print bash builtin-specific help in response to `help [builtin]`
> could well be helpful later and relates to what we discussed earlier.
> Is man(1) plus info(1) plus bash's help some kind of triple
> book-keeping or wheel-reinvention? Perhaps, but in terms of
> convenience, bash's `help` and `help [builtin]` are stiff competition
> to Edgar's earlier hints of `man -k Ic,Nm=[term]` and `man -O
> tag=[term]`.
> Don't get me wrong; I'm VERY grateful for the hints, and I don't think
> I have or know of an ideal solution. All the same, I think this is
> still an area where considerable possibility for user confusion yet
> abounds.
>
> Ian
>
> footnote:
> [1] This also means that if an OpenBSD sysadmin tries to be "helpful
> to newbies" by installing the bash they're maybe used to, they will by
> default clobber access to OpenBSD's excellent help(1), and it would
> take extra care to re-enable that and to then figure out a nice way to
> still provide access to bash's builtin help too... aaargh! Maybe bash
> on OpenBSD isn't the best choice really.
>
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