Re: Don't show help of `readonly' and `readarray' when I run `help read'

[Chris F.A. Johnson]

On Thu, 10 Feb 2011, Maarten Billemont wrote:

> On 10 Feb 2011, at 15:21, Chet Ramey wrote:
> > On 2/10/11 4:03 AM, Clark J. Wang wrote:
> > > help: help [-dms] [pattern ...]
> > >
> > > From my understanding the *pattern* here must be a glob-style pattern
> > > (wildcard) so `readonly' does not match the pattern `read'.
> >
> > The pattern is composed of the same characters as a glob pattern, but
> > it's treated more like 'grep ^pattern topic' if it doesn't contain any
> > special pattern matching characters.
> >
> > Kind of like the following:
> >
> > $ printf "%s\n" read readonly readarray | grep ^read /dev/stdin
> > read
> > readonly
> > readarray
>
> I must admit I personally dislike getting three pages of help output I don't 
> care about when doing `help read`.  If I wanted to learn about `readonly`, I'd 
> do `help readonly`.  I'm not sure the current behavior has any real merits over 
> treating the pattern like glob pattern matching usually works (anchored to 
> beginning and end).

  I totally agree.

--
   Chris F.A. Johnson, <http://cfajohnson.com/>
   Author:
   Pro Bash Programming: Scripting the GNU/Linux Shell (2009, Apress)
   Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (2005, Apress)