When to prefer man over help and viceversa ?
Hello @dnpuneeth3,
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.