Learning the bash Shell, Second Edition

Who Do I Turn to?

No matter how good something is or how much documentation comes with it, you’ll eventually come across something that you don’t understand or that doesn’t work. In such cases it can’t be stressed enough to carefully read the documentation (in computer parlance: RTFM). ^[142]In many cases this will answer your question or point out what you’re doing wrong.

Sometimes you’ll find this only adds to your confusion or confirms that there is something wrong with the software. The next thing to do is to talk to a local bash guru to sort out the problem. If that fails, or there is no guru, you’ll have to turn to other means (currently only via the Internet).

Asking Questions

If you have any questions about bash, there are currently two ways to go about getting them answered. You can email questions to [e-mail] or you can post your question to the USENET newsgroup gnu.bash.bug.

In both cases either the bash maintainer or some knowledgeable person on USENET will give you advice. When asking a question, try to give a meaningful summary of your question in the subject line.

Reporting Bugs

Bug reports should be sent to [e-mail] and should include the version of bash and the operating system it is running on, the compiler used to compile bash, a description of the problem, a description of how the problem was produced and, if possible, a fix for the problem. The best way to do this is by using the bashbug script which is installed when you install ...