Jeffrey Tse's Blog
Why the echo command has no help option?
Introduction
Have you ever tried to use the echo --help command to get some
help, but it just simply prints ‘–help’ literally, and similarly,
that echo --version has the same result. Why it didn’t work,
this article will lead us to find out more information.
Learn more about
This happens because you are using the echo built-in command of
bash,
which does not understand the --help option. The GNU echo
supports a --help option, as do some others. We could use
man echo command that relates to the linux man page of echo program.
To access the echo program, rather than the builtin, you can either give a path to it:
$ /bin/echo --help
or use Bash’s enable command to disable the built-in version:
$ enable -n echo
$ echo --help
Therefore, we can try it as below:
