help Command help Print concise description of command help command help prints a concise description of the options available for each specifed command. If the command is omitted, help prints a simple description of itself, followed by information about the command given by $LASTERROR, which is the last command returning a nonzero exit status. help provides more information than the usage message printed by a command, but less than the detailed description given by the man command. The primary purpose of help is to refresh your memory if you have forgotten an option to command. help prints information normally found between .HS and .HE macros in the nroff source for the manual pages. nroff ignores this in- formation. If help finds no information in the manual pages, it looks in /etc/helpfile for additional system information and in $HELP for user-specific information. Information about a command begins with a line @command and ends with the next line beginning with `@' in /etc/helpfile or $HELP. help constructs the index file /etc/helpindex to make subsequent searches of /etc/helpfile faster. ***** Files ***** /etc/helpfile -- Additional system information /etc/helpindex -- Index for helpfile /usr/man/cmd/* -- To extract summaries $HELP -- User information $LASTERROR -- Default command help ***** See Also ***** commands, man COHERENT Lexicon Page 1