Re: Is the description of set -- missing in man bash or at least difficult to find?

[Chris Jones]

On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 01:09:38PM EST, Peng Yu wrote:

> Hi,

> As I mentioned previously, there are shortcomings in man bash. Here,
> I just point another example. And I hope my suggestion will be
> addressed.

[..]

Here's my suggestion, and nothing needs to be ‘addressed’.

There are shortcomings in _the man documentation format_ and one of them
is that it doesn't work (at least for me...) when the documentation is
longer than one screen or thereabouts. I've pretty much come to the
conclusion that any man page that is over a couple of hundred lines is
a waste of my time and should probably not even exist in the first
place. 

What I did:

$ info bash

Then I selected the last entry: ‘Indexes’, then the ‘Variable Index’ and
then... I searched for ‘@’... and found exactly what I was looking for!

Took about three seconds!

In order to find more about ‘set’, I did the same, choosing the ‘Builtin
index’ instead of the ‘Variable Index’... and found everything I'll ever
need to know about ‘set’ before anyone has time to say Bob's your uncle.

Not to mention that I didn't waste anyone's time and bandwidth opening
a ‘bug report’... :-)

Be aware that in the event info's rather peculiar user interface is too
much of a hassle, you may find that the ‘pinfo’ derivative might better
suit your needs.

CJ