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).
