[Tex/LaTex] Where to find official (!) and extended documentation for tex/latex’s commandline options (especially -interaction modes)

compilingdocumentationtex-core

Today I tried to learn more about the several interaction modes for tex/latex/pdflatex etc. The manpages turned out to be not very helpful:

$ man tex

    ...
    -interaction mode
        Sets  the interaction mode.  The mode can be either batchmode,
        nonstopmode, scrollmode, and errorstopmode. The meaning of these
        modes is the same as that of the corresponding \commands.
    ...

While Google quickly helped me to learn what I wanted to know, I was suprised that I wasn't able to find useful and official documentation about this topic. After turning the whole documentation of my TeXLive distribution upside down I am asking now, if someone can please point me to the official and detailed documenation (if it exists) concerning the interaction modes and maybe the default values to some of the other commandline options.

Best Answer

The man page points these command line options as being equivalent to using the command forms such as \scrollmode, for which the official doc is the TeXBook, or 

texdoc texbytopic

for a free alternative (see chapter 32).

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