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Do all built-in programs in the Unix-like system comes with a manual page? If not, then please mention some such programs that doesn't have manual page

Mateen
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    Interesting project: find all executables in /bin and /usr/bin, and run `man` on each name, and examine stderr. Every section has an introduction like `man -s 1 intro`, and there are various sections up to about 8 for other components (syscalls, standard library, file formats, devices, ...). See `man man` for more. – Paul_Pedant May 13 '21 at 10:24
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    What do you mean by "built-in programs"? Man pages exist when developers are willing to provide them, there is probably not much more to say on this - see, for instance, https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/1832/315749. – fra-san May 13 '21 at 10:25
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    All POSIX commands have a man page as far as I know. I just declare all non-POSIX commands to be not built in. Done. – berndbausch May 13 '21 at 11:22
  • not all built-ins have a man page. e.g. try `man declare` or `man typeset`. on my system, the first gets a postgresql man page, `declare(7)`. The latter gets `No manual entry for typeset`. bash, however, has built-in help `e.g. help declare`. IMO it would be nice if there was also a `bashdoc` equivalent to `perldoc` or `pydoc` but AFAIK, there isn't. – cas May 13 '21 at 11:42
  • `whatis command-name` will tell you if man pages exist for `command-name` – Jeremy Boden May 13 '21 at 12:07
  • I'm surprised why this question is getting downvotes. – Mateen May 13 '21 at 15:54

1 Answers1

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A program gets a man page (or other documentation, for that matter) if someone writes it. Not all programs have a dedicated following willing to put in the work.

The Linux Documentation Project (and others, notably folks from Debian) have been chipping in to create/update manual pages, the kernel has its own area for manual pages documenting its interfaces.

Suggested overall structure is as described here. The 'roff format used to write them is quite forbidding, using pandoc you can write in MarkDown and translate to it, for a starting point see e.g. here.

Stephen Kitt
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vonbrand
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