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

[Maarten Billemont]

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
> 
> 
> Chet


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).