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Enter a command to see help text for each arg
- stavros 4y agoThis looks great! Is there a CLI utility that uses the site to do the same, perhaps?
- asicsp 4y agoI wrote a Linux CLI tool [0] that parses the man/help pages to extract option details. Works most of the time for me, but there are plenty of corner cases that don't work. [0] https://github.com/learnbyexample/command_help https://github.com/learnbyexample/command_help
- hnlmorg 4y agoSome shells have this built in, like Fish and my own one ( https://murex.rocks https://murex.rocks ) too
- stavros 4y agoFish has it? Which one is it? I use fish but I didn't know that.
- hnlmorg 4y agoIt’s on the front page: https://fishshell.com/ https://fishshell.com/ > Other shells support programmable completions, but only fish generates them automatically by parsing your installed man pages. Fish isn’t the only one though. In fact I’m not even sure it was the first. But it’s definitely the most mainstream shell to support it.
- asicsp 4y agoSome of the past discussions: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24525999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24525999 63 points, Sept 2020, 12 comments * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19124480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19124480 329 points, Feb 2019, 52 comments * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6834791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6834791 1372 points, Dec 2013, 171 comments * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6296634 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6296634 275 points, Aug 2013, 82 comments
- mdtrooper 4y agoOld url, but it is awesome, thanks for remembers it me. Is there a cli (offline) alternative?
- uggabuggar 4y ago
- rjh29 4y agoDoesn't understand "curl www.google.com", lol.
- 8organicbits 4y agoLooks like a reasonable response based on the man page, although it could be better. https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/curl.1.html https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/curl.1.html
- sureglymop 4y agoIt does... Obviously "www.google.com" is not in the manpage.
- avgcorrection 4y agoImagine if a programming language had at least two compilation targets from the start: machine code/byte code and prose.
- PerryCox 4y agoThis is a really neat idea! I wonder how close you could get the prose to actually explaining the codes purpose as opposed to just saying "this is a for loop"?
- avgcorrection 4y agoThe purpose (intent) wouldn’t be explained, but it could be useful for tools which have oddball syntax and are only used sometimes (infrequent enough for you to forget).
- Palomides 4y agoran into this one recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noweb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noweb along with other related literate programming tools
- _tom_ 4y agoThe Lucene search library has something like this. Data is stored /retrieved via codecs. Most write binary data, but one codec actually writes out all data as text. It is, of course, too slow for production use, but it is great for figuring out what is going on under the covers. https://blog.mikemccandless.com/2010/10/lucenes-simpletext-codec.html?m=1 https://blog.mikemccandless.com/2010/10/lucenes-simpletext-c...
- everybodyknows 4y agoNominated: go build go doc -all
- girishso 4y agoEvery couple of months I need this and can’t remember it’s name! So good to come across this again. Now on I’ll go through my hn comments.
- djbusby 4y agoHN let's you add a favorite too
- maest 4y agoI think this is supposed to be a fork bomb? https://explainshell.com/explain?cmd=%3A%28%29%7B%20%3A%7C%3A%26%20%7D%3B%3A https://explainshell.com/explain?cmd=%3A%28%29%7B%20%3A%7C%3... That's not clear at all from the explanation.
- sureglymop 4y agoIt seems to explain everything correctly though? Read through and it should make sense why it is a fork bomb .
- rzmmm 4y agoThe service is pretty neat. It's probably parsing the man pages somehow to create this. I wonder if it would be possible to utilize this parsed information to create type checking tools for shell scripts... Something which checks if correct count of arguments is given for command etc.
- g_p 4y agoYou can see how the parsing works in the source code (with a specific high level explanation of how this part works), as the site is an open source project. https://github.com/idank/explainshell#how https://github.com/idank/explainshell#how
- po1nt 4y ago> true(1) Translates to "Do nothing, successfuly" This tickles my imposter syndrome
- dinkleberg 4y agoThis is neat. Though when I ran a fairly simple ffmpeg command through here to try and make sense of it, it was only semi-useful. (Not a knock against this service, but just a testament to the complexity of ffmpeg lol) > ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libvpx-vp9 -crf 30 -b:v 2000k output.webm https://explainshell.com/explain?cmd=+ffmpeg+-i+input.mp4+-c%3Av+libvpx-vp9+-crf+30++-b%3Av+2000k+output.webm https://explainshell.com/explain?cmd=+ffmpeg+-i+input.mp4+-c... It doesn't seem to know what to do with combined flags in this case.
- TacticalCoder 4y ago> (Not a knock against this service, but just a testament to the complexity of ffmpeg lol) I found a modified a ffmpeg shell script no later than yesterday that finds all my movies files and generates one jpeg with 16 "tiles" thumbnails for each movie to try to make sense of the countless family "MOV40931.MOV" and whatnots and I've got to say: I agree with you. My big moment of solitude was when I started to work on parallelizing my shell script only to realize that, of course, ffmpeg already makes good use of all the cores so there's no point in parallelizing the shell script.
- Maursault 4y ago> I found a modified a ffmpeg shell script no later than yesterday that finds all my movies files and generates one jpeg with 16 "tiles" thumbnails for each movie I wrote a script called dovid I left on Pastebin that creates contact sheets (what you are describing) for every video file of any popular format in the directory executed and then combines them into a webpage or pdf. But it isn't an exceptional script because it just utilizes vcs[1] and convert (ImageMagick). At some point, I stopped using the script and just aliased this command (arbitrarily as 'peak') in my ~/.bash_profile alias peak='for i in *.mkv *.mpg *.wmv *.avi *.mov *.m4v *.mp4; do echo "$i"; /opt/local/bin/vcs -q -q -j -dt -ds -dp -u "0" -n 16 -c 4 -H 162 "$i"; done; echo ".......... converting jpgs to a pdf"; /opt/local/bin/convert *.jpg index.pdf; /bin/rm *.jpg' Creates a pdf of contact sheets 4x4@162dpi, much neater than a directory filled with as many jpegs as videos. Obviously, this is dangerous and destructive if there are other jpeg files in that directory. [1] http://p.outlyer.net/vcs http://p.outlyer.net/vcs (ffmpeg is a dependency)
- manibatra 4y agoJetbrains IDEs provide a link to explainshell.com with the highlighted shell command. Have used it often. Very helpful.