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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 The GNU Bourne-Again SHell). 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 -f readrec.so readrec

Note however that some systems require the full path to readrec.so in order for this command to work.