On Thu, Jul 23, 2026 at 7:12 AM Chet Ramey <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 7/20/26 3:31 PM, Britton Kerin wrote: > > > Given that read can operate on file descriptors and that bash supports named > > descriptors, I think the sentence about -t having no effect on regular files > > should be included in the help output as well. > > That's the crux of it. The help text is not intended to replace the man > page or texinfo documentation -- it exists as a quick reference to the > essential features. I suppose the difference is that it didn't happen to > include what you were looking for. > > > If it's going to leave out critical info I'd rather just see a > > 'See the full documentation for details' in the help. > > That's implicit and valid for every builtin documented by `help'.
Ok, but the help should still aim for a level of specificity that's consistent feature-to-feature. The help output for the -t option to read goes into considerable detail about behavior including return code, behavior on 0, etc., but it doesn't mention the conditions under which the option is operative *at all*. That's highly inconsistent specificity and should be fixed. I'd fix it by including the entire info documentation in the help (and maybe make that doc read better as well), but if the extra sentence or two is considered too much then the entire paragraph should be removed in favor of an explicit pointer to the correct documentation. Even if such a pointer is redundant with the implicit rule you refer to it's legitimate as a placeholder in cases where the behavior cannot be usefully described in sufficiently compact form. Britton
