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.