help vs info vs man
help commands
- help cd
- cd --help
- man ls
- apropos floppy
- whatis ls
- info coreutils
Source
help
is a built-in command in the bash
shell (and that shell only) that documents some of the builtin commands
and keywords of that shell. That's an internal documentation system of
that shell. Other shells have their own documentation system (ksh93
has --help
and --man
options for its builtins, zsh
has a run-help helper that extracts information from manuals in other formats). Other commands like vim
have their own embedded documentation system.man
is a system-wide documentation system that provides
short reference manuals (pages) for individual commands, API functions,
concepts, configuration file syntax, file formats organised in sections
(1 for user commands, 2 for system calls...). That's the traditional
Unix documentation system.info
is another documentation system originating in the
GNU project. It's hypertext with links (predates the web). An info
manual is like a digital book with a concept of table of contents and
(searchable) index which helps locating the information.There's overlap between the 3. For instance,
bash
being
part of the GNU project has both a man page and an info manual. The size
of the manual makes the man system not as appropriate for bash
though. However, the structure of the info manual and index is not very good in bash
which makes it not as easy to look information in as in other info
manuals like zsh
's. zsh
manual being even bigger is split into several man pages and also has a good info
manual with a very good index.It should be noted that the
info
manual is generated from a texinfo
format which is also used to generate HTML and printable (PDF/PS) versions. In the case of zsh
though, the texinfo is generated from another format (yodl
).
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