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- The help facility allows one to look up help pages which
- where extracted from the standard Tcl manual pages and Tcl
- scripts during Tcl installation. Help files are struc-
- tured as a multilevel tree of subjects and help pages.
- Help files are found by searching directories named help
- in the directories listed in the auto_path variable. All
- of the files in the list of help directories form a vir-
- tual root of the help tree. This method allows multiple
- applications to provide help trees without having the
- files reside in the same directory.
-
- The help facility can be accessed in two ways, as interac-
- tive commands in the Extended Tcl shell or as an interac-
- tive Tk-based program (if you have built Extended Tcl with
- Tk).
-
- To run the Tk-based interactive help program:
-
- tclhelp ?addpaths?
- Where addpaths are additional paths to search for help
- directories. By default, only the auto_path used by
- tclhelp is search. This will result in help on Tcl,
- Extended Tcl and Tk.
-
- The following interactive Tcl commands and options are
- provided with the help package:
-
- help
- Help, without arguments, lists of all the help sub-
- jects and pages under the current help subject.
-
- help subject
- Displays all of help pages and lower level subjects
- (if any exist) under the subject subject.
-
- help subject/helppage
- Display the specified help page. The help output
- is passed through a simple pager if output exceeds
- 23 lines, pausing waiting for a return to be
- entered. If any other character is entered, the
- output is terminated.
-
- helpcd ?subject?
- Change the current subject, which is much like the
- Unix current directory. If subject is not speci-
- fied, return to the top-level of the help tree.
- Help subject path names may also include ``..''
- elements.
-
- helppwd
- Displays the current help subject.
-
- help help | ?
- Displays help on the help facility at any directory
- level.
-
- apropos pattern
- This command locates subjects by searching their
- one-line descriptions for a pattern. Apropos is
- useful when you can remember part of the name or
- description of a command, and want to search
- through the one-line summaries for matching lines.
- Full regular expressions may be specified (see the
- regexp command).
-
- These procedures are provided by Extended Tcl.
-