[there]

The built-in help for history, unfortunately, is woefully inadequate; this was the output:

i always wondered whether linux had such terrible man pages because nobody read them, or whether nobody read them because they were so terrible.

[1amzave]

Well, since 'history' is a shell builtin, the thing to do would be 'help history', which actually gives a pretty thorough explanation of it. (And it's also explained pretty fully if you look at the actual man page for bash.) What the grandparent commenter saw was in fact just the brief "you invoked this command wrong" synopsis message, since '--help' isn't a flag recognized by the 'history' command (assuming his version of bash behaves similarly to mine).

Sure, there are some more obscure, less-commonly-used commands that are poorly documented, but for the basic stuff (and yes, that includes bash), I've found man pages to generally be a pretty good source of information.

[koeselitz]

Yes, the actual linux documentations are actually very good. I live on a server with hacked-together shell commands that are badly-documented, so I'm in the bad habit of doing the --help thing (the default around here).

The man pages are indeed very good. It's also worth noting that the Gnu people tend to prefer info pages - and 'history' is traditionally a Gnu-maintained command (as part of binutils) - so you'll get the absolute best documetation I know of (long explanations, interesting permutations, obscure hacks) if you do:

info history