from Hacker News

Explaining Shell Commands in the Shell (2014)

by jap on 7/19/15, 6:53 AM with 11 comments

  • by tomkwok on 7/19/15, 7:51 AM

    So it's like a command line version of http://explainshell.com/ ...

    And it seems like your site / API backend is not open source. Do you plan to make an offline version?

  • by heydonovan on 7/19/15, 2:43 PM

    Awesome concept! I've never been a fan of looking up flags in another tab, and hunting down which ones are in use. Just seems like it should be an automatic process. The explainshell website is great, but it doesn't work offline. Fish's man page auto-completion is useful, but it lists all the flags, instead of the ones currently in use. If I could have this for every command out there, along with the binary's location/version at the top, I'd be a happy camper.
  • by erikb on 7/19/15, 9:03 PM

    Why does it say "in the shell" when the actual work is done by a web server? Sorry, I was just really curious how you grep/awk/sed through some man pages.
  • by Vimlociraptor on 7/19/15, 2:12 PM

  • by grymoire1 on 7/19/15, 4:35 PM

    I'm not sure why it is defined as a function when a shell script would work as well, and prevents .bashrc clutter.

    Also it doesn't understand traditional tar options, i.e. explain 'tar xf filename'

  • by amelius on 7/19/15, 12:56 PM

    Does it work with the "find" command, and its overly complicated way of processing arguments?