4 ms·

Tried it. The explain read-out seemed reasonable. Care to elaborate how it wasn't informative?

• jff 13y ago
  The explanation for "du" and its -a flag make it sound like I'm trying to find out how much disk space my files are using. Fine, that's the usual usage, but the point here is that it lists out every file under the current directory. The bigger problem is grep. We're told that grep prints lines matching a pattern, great. But then the explanation of the arguments makes it sound, to the uninitiated, like I'm giving "foo" as the filename, because the site doesn't include the actual grep syntax. It doesn't really explain what the command line is doing. It does seem to do a decent job of telling someone who's already fluent in shell usage the specific meaning of all options given. That's actually pretty important these days where any given GNU util will have flags for every single letter of the alphabet in both upper and lower case.
  • ygra 13y ago
    That's not really solvable in this case, though. All explainshell has are the man pages of the commands. It cannot know how they will interact with each other. It should be at least semi-possible in PowerShell (because you have output type information and parameter type information), but I hit a roadblock with ExplainPS a while ago and haven't had the time to resurrect it.
  • wilcox 13y ago
    Perhaps you should go for find . / -name filename instead. Using du -a | grep filename works for sure, but it a bit of hack.