`man bash | grep ulimit` returns nothing

Question

I know that the builtin command ulimit is listed in the bash man page.

Grepping for it doesn't return anything though. Why?

grep and man both work fine, man bash | grep strings returns several matching lines.

I suspect it's something to do with bold text or similar, but I can't find the answer. The environment variable LANG=en_US.UTF-8.

(I'm trying this on the latest Mac OS X Snow Leopard, with Terminal.app, if that's important. My interactive shell is zsh.)

EDIT: GNU grep 2.5.1, man 1.6c.

Answer 1

I don't have your environment so I cannot test. As a workaround you can pipe the output to a file and grep through that instead

man bash | col -bx > /tmp/bash.man
grep ulimit /tmp/bash.man

Answer 2

I do not have a Mac, but on Ubuntu, the manual page is shown through the less program.

To search in a manual page, press / followed by the search term (ulimit). In a bash shell, you can run help ulimit to get help on ulimit.

I do not know why your grep does not filter ulimit out. ulimit is bold-faced in the manual page, perhaps that has something to do with it. Certain escape sequences are hidden, but do have an effect: it changes (background) color or changes the appearance (underlined, bold-faced).

From my bash (version 4.2.8):

ulimit: ulimit [-SHacdefilmnpqrstuvx] [limit]
  Modify shell resource limits.

  Provides control over the resources available to the shell and processes
  it creates, on systems that allow such control.

  Options:
    -S        use the `soft' resource limit
    -H        use the `hard' resource limit
    -a        all current limits are reported
    -b        the socket buffer size
    -c        the maximum size of core files created
    -d        the maximum size of a process's data segment
    -e        the maximum scheduling priority (`nice')
    -f        the maximum size of files written by the shell and its children
    -i        the maximum number of pending signals
    -l        the maximum size a process may lock into memory
    -m        the maximum resident set size
    -n        the maximum number of open file descriptors
    -p        the pipe buffer size
    -q        the maximum number of bytes in POSIX message queues
    -r        the maximum real-time scheduling priority
    -s        the maximum stack size
    -t        the maximum amount of cpu time in seconds
    -u        the maximum number of user processes
    -v        the size of virtual memory
    -x        the maximum number of file locks

  If LIMIT is given, it is the new value of the specified resource; the
  special LIMIT values `soft', `hard', and `unlimited' stand for the
  current soft limit, the current hard limit, and no limit, respectively.
  Otherwise, the current value of the specified resource is printed.  If
  no option is given, then -f is assumed.

  Values are in 1024-byte increments, except for -t, which is in seconds,
  -p, which is in increments of 512 bytes, and -u, which is an unscaled
  number of processes.

  Exit Status:
  Returns success unless an invalid option is supplied or an error occurs.