from Hacker News

Explain shell

by royalharsh95 on 2/9/19, 8:43 PM with 52 comments

  • by BossingAround on 2/10/19, 8:56 AM

    Explain shell is something that has helped me a lot, but the situation of needing it left me baffled for so long... Why can't I search by command + flag? For example, I know what command A does, but I'm not sure what flag C means. I can search for man A, but why can't I search man A --flag C to get only the relevan portion of the manpage?

    This has baffled me for years. I'd have guessed that discoverability and documentation would be a core functionality and focus of open source developers.

    Also, if I find a command which flag is not explained by explain shell, is there some source I can create PR to? Some DB, where I could propose the addition..?

  • by mitchtbaum on 2/10/19, 4:04 PM

  • by emit_time on 2/10/19, 12:05 AM

    Explains Hell
  • by _they on 2/9/19, 11:44 PM

  • by reilly3000 on 2/10/19, 8:25 AM

    Welp, I still don't know what :(){ :|:& };: exactly does, but it sure borked my WSL. Error: 0x80070040 after forking too many processes.

    I know comment moderation sucks, but it would be great to have some kind of wiki/comment system/human generated notes on popular commands.

  • by asicsp on 2/10/19, 1:25 PM

    Inspired by this site, I made a handy shell script[0] for use from cli - good enough to lookup documentation for options from man/help pages. Doesn't cover all the features offered by explainshell, there are issues with some corner cases and tested only on Ubuntu

    [0]https://github.com/learnbyexample/command_help

  • by freecodyx on 2/10/19, 1:20 PM

    What I like most about this kind of posts. Is that users will share other alternatives and gems. Not disspointed
  • by tptacek on 2/9/19, 11:16 PM

    This is great, but the man page for pipes is probably not helpful to the kinds of people who benefit from this tool.
  • by monkpit on 2/10/19, 1:02 AM

    Can’t view the page on iPhone 6 and safari. Doesn’t let you zoom out to see the whole page at once.
  • by noir_lord on 2/10/19, 1:55 PM

    https://explainshell.com/explain?cmd=rsync+--progress+-avr+-...

    This is really well done, what a neat resource.

  • by amelius on 2/10/19, 4:20 PM

    This is convenient but I still stand by the statement I made here:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16085604

  • by mladen5 on 2/11/19, 4:44 PM

    I love this so much. Its perfect tool for developers, i don't know how i didn't encounter this sooner, it exists for more then 5 years.
  • by platz on 2/10/19, 4:33 AM

  • by colordrops on 2/10/19, 12:37 AM

    A command line version would be great.
  • by lolikoisuru on 2/10/19, 5:40 PM

    The only thing one should gather from these threads is that mos people on this site are completely incapable of using the shell and are too lazy to learn it.
  • by gatewaynode on 2/10/19, 12:30 PM

    Why is the first example a fork bomb?!?
  • by bernardv on 2/10/19, 3:13 PM

    Nicely done