How to view short descriptions of all bash builtin commands?

Question

Well, the command help returns a two column list which includes the syntax of all builtin commands.

The command help -d returns exactly the same as above.

The command help -d printf returns a short description of the command printf:

printf - Formats and prints ARGUMENTS under control of the FORMAT.

The command help -d p returns short descriptions of all the commands starting with p:

popd - Remove directories from stack.
printf - Formats and prints ARGUMENTS under control of the FORMAT.
pushd - Add directories to stack.
pwd - Print the name of the current working directory.

So, is there some way of producing a list of short descriptions for all commands?

I tried help -d * and it didn't work. I wonder why I didn't think of backslash or quotes. Probably too tired. Thank you for your suggestion. — SkarmoutsosV
– SkarmoutsosV, Commented Dec 10, 2020 at 23:13

Jaap Joris Vens · Accepted Answer · 2020-12-13 20:37:55Z

1

This is the command you're looking for:

help -d ''

This works because help expects a pattern as the final argument, and an empty pattern will match all topics. You can pass an empty argument to a command by using '' or "".

I suspect the help source code contains a statement like the following pseudocode:

if (pattern) {
    results = search(pattern);
    print(results);
}
else {
    print(OVERVIEW_TABLE)
}

edited Dec 13, 2020 at 20:37

answered Dec 11, 2020 at 10:52

Jaap Joris Vens

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1 Comment

SkarmoutsosV Over a year ago

Yes, this works as well as Cyrus's suggestions on previous comment. Can you provide some explanation or link to an explanation to understand why this works?

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