Specifications

70 Version 2.0
implementation of the shell. Some of these command profiles are standard (see “Shell
Command Profiles”, section 5.2) and others can be defined by implementers.
D
uring installation, UEFI Shell applications may provide a help file (as described in
“Command-Line Help”, section 3.11.2) to support the standard help command.
During installation, UEFI Shell applications may update a help file for the help
category/categories to which the application belongs. This consists of creating a NAME
section for the <category>.man file and then copying the NAME section from the
command’s help file to the end of the DESCRIPTION section of the <command>.man file,
if not already present.
The shell application’s category (or categories) is listed in the CATEGORY section of
the shell application’s help (.man) file. Help categories are not described as part of
this specification.
3.11.2 Command-Line Help
The user can get UEFI Shell application command-line either using the help command
or else by typing in <command-name> -?. Both of these use the GetHelpText() (page
32) function to retrieve the help text.
The UEF
I Shell gets help text for UEFI Shell applications by search the directory where
startup.nsh was located (highest priority) (if –nostartup was not specified) and then
the directories specified by the path environment variable for a file with the same
name as the UEFI Shell application, but with the .man extension. The format of these
files is described in Appendix B.
T
he UEFI Shell supports help categories, which have .man pages similar to those for
UEFI shell applications, except using the category name instead of the application
name.