Can I get individual man pages for the bash builtin commands?

Question

Is there anywhere you can download a manpage for every builtin commands?

I know you can just use help or man bash and search to find info about it, but I want them separated, so I can just do man read and get the read manpage.

Answer 1

Try this:

bashman () { man bash | less -p "^       $1 "; }

You may have to hit n a couple of times to get to the actual command instead of a paragraph that happens to have the command name as the first word.

Answer 2

help read
help read | less

In zsh:

run-help read

or type read something and press M-h (i.e. Alt+h or ESC h).

If you want to have a single man command so as not to need to know whether the command is a built-in, define this function in your ~/.bashrc:

man () {
  case "$(type -t "$1"):$1" in
    builtin:*) help "$1" | "${PAGER:-less}";;     # built-in
    *[[?*]*) help "$1" | "${PAGER:-less}";;       # pattern
    *) command -p man "$@";;  # something else, presumed to be an external command
                              # or options for the man command or a section number
  esac
}