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

[Chet Ramey]

On 2/10/11 5:34 PM, Chris F.A. Johnson wrote:
> 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.

This is certainly something I will consider changing for the next bash
release (after bash-4.2).

Chet
-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/