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16 Bash Builtins

The command-line utilities described in Invoking the Utilities are designed to be used interactively in the shell. Together, and often combined with the standard shell utilities, they provide a quite complete user interface. However, the user's experience can be greatly improved by a closer integration between the recutils and the shell. The following sections describe several extensions for bash, the GNU shell (see Top). These extensions make the shell “aware” of the recutils.

As with any bash built-in, help is available in the command line using the help command. For example:

     $ help readrec

If you installed recutils using a binary package in a GNU/Linux distribution, odds are that the built-in commands described in this chapter are already available to you. Otherwise (you get a “command not found” or similar error) you may have to register the built-in commands with your bash. This is very easy using the enable bash command. The registering command for readrec would be:

     $ enable readrec.so readrec