Why newbies don't RTFM... i686pclinux

On my system (Mandrake 10.1) 'man cd' returns just the first part of what you show below. To see more, I'd have to do 'man bash' then find the part of the manual that describes 'cd'.

I read man pages uses XEmacs so finding the right section isn't hard:

cd -L-P dir Change the current directory to dir. The variable HOME is the default dir. The variable CDPATH defines the search path for the directory containing dir. Alternative directory names in CDPATH are separated by a colon (:). A null directory name in CDPATH is the same as the current directory, i.e., ``.''. If dir begins with a slash (-), then CDPATH is not used. The -P option says to use the physical directory structure instead of following symbolic links (see also the -P option to the set builtin command); the -L option forces symbolic links to be fol- lowed. An argument of - is equivalent to $OLDPWD. The return value is true if the directory was successfully changed; false otherwise.

Using the right tool to read man pages might help.

Of course there are, but being able to find the right paragraph quickly is important.

Make a definite suggestion, or you are just ranting.

Do you want:

man bash-builtin-cd

Note that cd is always a shell builtin so you'd want to convince all the shell writers that they need to do this. Also remember that many people prefer one big reference for bash so you will have to devise a scheme for creating one big page along with the separate pages without duplicating things.

Man pages are references, not tutorials. Websurfing to Linux tutorials is one of the great things about Linux. (IMO).

True, there are no examples for cd.

You seem to have the kernel and the shell confused.

If you think you know a better way, send patches to the bash developers. If you want to discuss your changes here first, show us that constructive criticism.